The Memory Killer

by J. A. Kerley

And then I had flashers blinking, sirens blasting, as I headed to the pathology lab at Daytona 500 speed. The on-duty pathologist was Bernard Hackett, a humorless drone who viewed every request as an imposition. Morningstar would have loved to have sacked him, but Hackett was a state employee with twenty-five years in grade, and enjoyed a sinecure shared by popes and Supreme Court justices alike.

  I found Hackett hiding in an autopsy suite and reading a sailing magazine. When I told him what I wanted, he glared like I’d pissed in his grits.

  “You want what?”

  I tapped the cooler holding the Great Campini. “Gary Ocampo. I want a DNA test done, Bernie. Get some tissue from him and—”

  “It’s Dr Hackett. Two complete DNA screens were already performed. One at the university, one right here and less than three weeks ago. Both showed that—”

  I grabbed a scalpel from a tray and opened the drawer holding Gary Ocampo, lifting a fat hand.

  “Will a finger do?”

  Hackett’s magazine dropped to the floor. He decided to go back to work.

  I had the Invisible Wires feeling. Harry Nautilus, my former partner in Mobile, coined the term years ago: you feel unseen wires all around you connecting pieces of a case. But you can’t see them, you can only grope blindly. Then one day – by perseverance, intuition or blind luck – you trip over one. And pull yourself hand over hand to the conclusion.

  I called Gershwin to the morgue, then sat in a quiet autopsy suite until the results arrived, running the water on a nearby table to give my ears something pleasant to hear. A half-hour later I heard the door and looked up to see Roy enter the room.

  “Jesus, it’s cold as a fucking morgue in here,” he said, pulling on the seersucker jacket he’d been carrying. His white shirt was unbuttoned at the neck and his blue tie loosened. “I got a whispery call saying someone from our department was over here wasting taxpayer dollars. It sounded so amusing I figured you were involved.”

  I sighed. The twit Hackett at work. He obtained the tissue sample and took it to the lab, but thought he’d snipe back at me for making him perform what he judged a redundant test.

  “So what’s going on, bud?” Roy asked, checking the cigar count in his pocket.

  “I was gonna drop a dead guy’s finger in the new DNA machine, Roy. See where it pointed.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I waved it away. “I’m re-testing Gary Ocampo’s DNA.”

  The pumpkin face turned puzzled and I was about to explain when Gerri Haskins entered holding a read-out. “The DNA is not his,” she said, perplexed. “Ocampo’s. I mean, yes, it is his: Ocampo’s. No, I mean …”

  “It’s Gary’s DNA now,” I elucidated. “But before, it was Donnie’s.”

  “Someone care to fill me in?” Roy said, pulling a wrapped cigar to twirl.

  “Gary used sleight-of-hand to force-feed us the perp’s DNA,” I said. “He switched it at the university, and repeated it with me.”

  Roy frowned. “He gave you Donnie’s DNA? But I thought you already—”

  “I doubt the perp’s name is Donnie, Roy. He’s certainly not Ocampo’s brother.”

  “Don’t perps prefer we not have their DNA? Why the switch?”

  I displayed the photo sheet for the two hundred and first time. “So we’d put everything we had into chasing this guy. Except he doesn’t exist.”

  Roy paced the floor until he got it, the cigar spinning like a tiny baton. “But aren’t you back to square one, Carson? No Donnie, no suspect, no nothing?”

  “Nothing can be good when the only something is false, Roy.”

  “I’d sure like to understand that.”

  “Gary gave us a misdirection designed to close our eyes to every direction but this …” I tapped the sheet of photos. “But now they’re open in every direction.”

  I called Dr Roth at the University, where the first switcheroo had occurred. Our initial trip had been fishing baitless in the dark, concerned with procedures, not participants. Things had changed.

  As I’d told Roy, by opening up, they closed in. Ziggy arrived and I whistled him to the Rover, filling him in as we drove, his eyes widening as I detailed the scheme.

  “Gary gave the university someone else’s DNA?” he said.

  “The Great Campini at work. When the DNA test came back positive for Gary, we went to bust a strong, stealthy perp.”

  “But presto … it’s the Goodyear Blimp.”

  “Gary and his partner figured the cops might want DNA confirmation, so Gary’s pouring DNA, red eyes, nose dripping, sneezing into tissues and dramatically flipping them to a basket a meter from my hand. He figured I’d—”

  “Onions!” Gershwin said, slapping the dash.

  “What?”

  “We smelled onions that day. I’ll bet the moment we elevatored up he took a snootful of onion powder. Hocus-pocus and on us is the jokus: instant tears and a nose dripping like a faucet.”

  I shot a thumbs-up. “The perp spits on tissues and they go into the wastebasket, more tucked under the sheets. Gary sneezes into a tissue, palms it and substitutes one with the perp’s DNA. It matches the U’s sample, and the only answer is an identical twin that died but didn’t, with an emptied grave to ice the cake. It’s insane. It’s brilliant.”

  Roth met us in the lobby and sat us in her office. She’d heard that Gary had died, but the poisoning aspect hadn’t been revealed. I didn’t bring it up, not yet.

  “So sad,” she said, shaking her head. “A heart attack?”

  “They’re still running tests. Did Gary have any close friends among the test participants? I’m betting yes.”

  “You are a detective. Gary was thick as thieves with an early participant. How’d you know that?”

  “An inkling. What was the friend’s name?”

  “Derek Scott.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Derek Scott. Their friendship started on day one, like they had some sort of bond.”

  I shot a look at Gershwin. His face was cool, emotionless. But I knew his breath was like mine: locked in his throat. “Bond?” Gershwin asked Roth.

  “Their histories, maybe. Derek seemed a big influence on Gary, like the friend Gary always wanted, someone to talk to, to share confidences. They became inseparable after a couple of meetings, but maybe … maybe Derek needed Gary as much as Gary needed him.”

  “Did I hear disapproval in your voice, Doctor?” I asked.

  “Derek Scott could be negative, Detective,” Roth said carefully. “There was a darker side to him. I did worry a bit about the kind of influence he might have on Gary, who seemed to see a soulmate in Scott. Sometimes I sensed a manipulative side to Derek, so I wasn’t so sure.”

  I felt faint, breathless with the thought that we’d just stumbled over the central wire. Derek Scott was Gary Ocampo’s soulmate?

  “How much did you see of them?” I asked evenly.

  “More of Gary, since Derek was only in the first phase of the program.”

  “The first phase was the peer groups, support groups, whatever?” I said.

  Roth nodded. “Social support, shared purpose. I moderated the first two meetings. After that, participants made their own decisions about where and when to meet. How deep to go into their problems.”

  Down to the bottom, I thought.

  “You mentioned the pair were together from day one, Dr Roth,” Gershwin asked. “Any record of that day?”

  “I videotaped the first meeting. But participants have an expectation of privacy, Detective Gershwin. I can’t make it available.”

  I told her what had actually happened to Gary Ocampo.

  “I’ll set up a conference room for viewing,” she said.

  Ten minutes later we sat in a conference room and saw fifteen obese men in a circle of wooden chairs, one of several phase-one male support groups, the thought being that participants would open up more to their own gender. The camera was distant and unobtrusive.

  Roth was having the
participants introduce themselves, tell why they over-ate, and what they wanted weight loss to accomplish. Roth was a comfortable and concerned big sister, radiating warmth. After nine introduction-cum-confessions, she came to Gary. He pushed to his feet, not making it on the first try.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, trying again.

  “You can stay seated, Gary,” Roth said.

  “My name is Gary,” he said, looking at the floor. “And I, uh, have been fat all my life and people have made fun of me all my life. I’m here because I hate me and …” he paused, swallowed hard, and brought his eyes up to meet the other eyes. “And because my mom hated me, too. Sometimes, at least, when she was drinking. I eat because I always feel empty.”

  Silence. The other introductions had been shy and halting and general. Ocampo’s confession was deep and obviously painful and I wondered if it had surprised Gary as much as it surprised the others. Roth came back with a follow-up.

  “Why do you want to lose weight, Gary? Your goal.”

  “I want to travel without people looking at me and laughing or whispering. Everyone here knows what it’s like to be looked at like a freak.”

  Murmurs of assent. The introductions continued until the last man took his feet. He was obese, but not the size of many of the others who, like Gary, stayed in their chairs during the intros. His hair was neatly parted and his eyes looked toward Gary as he made his introduction.

  “My name is Derek Scott and, like Gary, I’ve been big all my life …”

  “No stammer,” I said, hearing a different voice. “That was for us.”

  “My old man was a mean drunk,” Scott continued, “and my mama was too. She left without so much as a goodbye. When she left I started to get fatter. I’m tired of carrying all this shit around and that’s why I’m here.”

  “Thank you, Derek,” Roth said. “And do you have a specific weight-loss goal?”

  “Yeah. I wanna say ‘Fuck you’ to all the assholes who laughed at me.”

  A moment of surprised silence. Then chuckles and the kind of applause that comes from a shared, but generally unstated, wish.

  We left the building at a run.

  59

  Scott’s address was bogus, which pretty much nailed him as the perp, not that we had any doubts. He’d evidently dosed himself with enough toxins to show up in his system, but not so much he couldn’t control actions designed to get him busted by the MDPD and – as he no doubt knew from his my-drink-got-spiked routine – routed to me, where he’d sent us every direction but straight.

  Gershwin handled a revised Be On the LookOut, the new BOLO heading to every law-enforcement venue in South Florida. When that was done, he sat quiet for a moment and turned to me.

  “The night the surveillance team left their watch. Nothing happened, right? At the shop?”

  I thought it through. “The cup got poisoned when Derek Scott visited Gary. I figure Gary was trying to get Derek to stop the ultra-violence. Derek probably listened and maybe made mollifying noises. Then went to the cupboard and did his thing. Then called me and made a big deal of Gary trying to kiss him, like Gary was an emotional wreck.”

  “He was.”

  Another brilliant move by Scott: poison Gary’s cup during his visit, then create a diversion so we’d think Donnie had entered: there’d be no suspicions of Scott as Gary’s sole visitor before the poisoning.

  “The BOLO should be widespread in an hour,” Gershwin said. “Where from here?”

  I called Dr Clark at the Hardee clinic. “I just sent you an e-mail photo, Dr Clark. Could you take a look?”

  I heard a chair roll, fingers tapping a keyboard. “I’m opening my mail now … Damn, is that Derek Scott? Jesus … how much weight has he lost?”

  Clark knew Scott. Another wire made visible. “Over one-fifty. Tell me what you know about Derek, please. It’s important.”

  “Derek in trouble?”

  “More than I can explain right now.”

  A sigh. “Derek’s old man was Rudy Scott, a veterinarian who had a large-animal practice here for decades. Rudy was a gentle and soft-hearted fool who was, I think, confounded by his son.”

  “How so?”

  “Derek was bright as it gets, maybe got it from his mom. She was local, from a dirt-poor family, but had the kind of smarts a lot of folks call cunning. She targeted Rudy with bright eyes and big boobs, nailed him with a pregnancy, probably thinking marrying a guy with Doctor in front of his name meant a cushy life.”

  “A country vet not a high-pay position?”

  “If you run it right. But Rudy was the type of guy to take payment in eggs instead of dollars and probably got paid in full about half the time, too meek to go after what he was owed. I think Rudy felt more at home with critters than people, understood them better. That woman used to give Rudy hell, call him names in public, berate him.”

  “Where’s Mama Scott now?”

  “She screwed about a quarter of the men in the county and ran off when Derek was fourteen. Not long after, I started hearing rumors about the kid. Folks tell me things they need to tell, but don’t want to travel further. Nasty stuff.”

  “Explain, please.”

  “Derek was fat, but not a jolly fat boy or whatever the stereotype is. He was a bully and a heavy drinker. I’m sure a lot of his weight came from drinking, but he ate to excess, too, not big on self-control.”

  “That’s not all that nasty of a rumor, Doc.”

  “I’m getting there. When Derek got to high school I started hearing that he could discern young men who were homosexual and hiding it, ashamed. The whispers were that Derek’d zero in on troubled young men and take advantage in many ways. Sexual was one of them. He knew he wouldn’t get caught.”

  “If the victims told on Derek, they outed themselves.”

  “I think Rudy knew his kid was screwed up, Detective Ryder. But if you don’t look directly at a problem …”

  I nodded. “It doesn’t exist.”

  “Rudy died three years back, drove off a pier into Okeechobee. Witnesses said he made no attempt to brake, like he saw a road that wasn’t there. But he had a solid practice developed over years and it sold for over a million bucks.”

  “Derek would have known about toxic plants?” I asked.

  “There are million-dollar thoroughbreds at some of these farms, Detective. Brahma breeding cattle. A vet around here knows every toxic plant by sight and symptom. And Derek went to vet school three years.”

  “How much chemistry would Derek know?” I asked.

  “Chemistry classes would have been in the first couple years, so he knew plenty.”

  “Could Derek have known José Abaca?”

  “Everyone knew the go-to man for bad things. But I doubt Derek ever had any business with Abaca.”

  I expect you might be wrong there, Doc, I thought, wondering how much Scott had paid Abaca to deliver tainted tacos. And did he find any money remaining when he poisoned Abaca?

  I ran out of questions, thanked Clark, hung up.

  “Think Daddy Scott was an experiment, Kemo Sabe? With datura?” Gershwin asked when I detailed my call.

  “If it was, it made Derek a millionaire. And killing a misguided, harmless father for money is pure sociopath territory, Zigs. Maybe toxic plants gave little Derek his first real experience with power. So he made them his study.”

  “He may not have finished his degree,” Gershwin noted. “But he sure did his fieldwork.”

  Debro sat naked in his living room smelling himself, nose bobbing from one armpit to the other, entranced. He loved to smell himself; it was like his whole body was breathing, every pore. He’d just put in a session with Patrick White followed by a session with the weights and he smelled like heat and energy.

  At first he’d ridden his boys like carnival ponies, one after the other, riding until his thighs were chafed and his balls got so empty it hurt to squirt. Sex was good – no problem there – but it was limiting: You felt good while i
t was going on, then there was a big snap and it was over. But punishing his bitches? That was best because the glow hung on for days, even after they were gone. It was like his hand could still feel the pry-bar smashing Brighton’s legs, ears hearing the beautiful wet thup of the metal hitting meat.

  And Eisen’s tongue? Debro had only to pinch his fingers together like pliers to feel the slippery resistance of the twitching organ, Eisen going “Errr … arr … arghhh” as the sweet pink meat was sliced from its roots.

  Bliss.

  Prestwick? Pretty, pretty Billyboy. That had been the finest event of Debro’s life: a single-edge razor blade outlining the face, tiny blood pearls rising from the incision like datura pushing from the ground. Debro’s hand closed into a fist as he felt the cup of flesh beneath Prestwick’s chin, hot and wet as his fingers burrowed beneath and …

  Debro owned a face.

  That was it, wasn’t it? You owned them. And the more you took from them, the more you owned.

  It was time to understand what it was like to own one completely.

  The lights had been turned off in the room and Patrick suspected he was being watched, his peripheral vision catching a shape in the small window in the door. But he couldn’t be certain the head-shape wasn’t a delusion. Sometimes visions rose in his head: snakes on the floor, balloons in the air, flames skittering across the linoleum.

  The door opened; he’d been right: Scott entered. Patrick forced himself to stare at the ceiling, appearing drugged, dulled, sunk into delirium. A floorboard squeaked and Patrick inadvertently turned to the sound, his face rising to meet eyes looking down.

  The eyes locked.

  “I think it’s time to hit you again, bitch,” Scott said. He wore only a jock strap and crouched and waved his hand in front of Patrick’s eyes. Patrick made himself stare dead ahead. Hit. It could only be an injection.

  Scott straightened and sipped from a can of beer. Patrick tried to move his arms, felt them twitch and stutter, the control erratic; no way he could take the muscular Scott, a man in full control of his mind and his body.

  And if Patrick revealed his awareness, what would happen? There was but one course of action: accept the dose and hope the countering pharmaceuticals retained some blunting power.