Miami Midnight

by Alex Segura

  Atticus was their three-year-old son, she’d explained on the way back as they rode in her slightly run-down 2013 Taurus.

  As they reached the end of the hall, Carmen opened a door, which led into what she called “Melissa’s supposed office”—a room stacked with books, papers, pictures, and boxes—which made it far from a functional workroom.

  “I have the same kind of space in our—well, my—old apartment,” Kathy said, moving toward the door. “Office-slash-storage-slash-storage.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” Carmen said. “This is where we put all my dad’s stuff. See those gray filing cabinets in the back? That was all his. I’ve gotten maybe one or two drawers in.”

  “Can we stick around until we’re done?” Pete asked.

  Carmen nodded as she stepped back, allowing Kathy and Pete to move into the small office.

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” she said. “Though, Atticus goes down around eight. If you’re still here then—”

  “We’ll get out of your hair before then,” Kathy said with a smile.

  Pete closed the door as Carmen’s footsteps echoed down the long hall. “You wanna take one cabinet and I’ll take the other?” he asked.

  “You’re the boss.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing, believe it or not,” Kathy said, moving toward the right cabinet and opening the top drawer. “Did you notice how disorganized this place is?”

  “Well, they have a toddler.”

  “Wasn’t a criticism,” Kathy said. “Just a detail. It’s those little things that hit me as I get further along. How big a change it’s going to be.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Pete said, his back to Kathy. “We can handle this.”

  “We will?” Kathy said, turning around. “Let me rattle off some fast facts for you, my dear: I have been kicked out of my apartment. I am pregnant. You are the father. We are not together. These things are all related and yet we’re still going from task to task, working on this case like nothing else matters. And hey, I’m guilty, too—it’s nice to be distracted, but—”

  Pete stepped toward her, placing his arms gently on her shoulders.

  She looked up at him.

  “We’ll figure this out, all right?” Pete said. “I’m not trying to ignore it. I’m not trying to avoid it. I’ve done that for too long. Tomorrow, I’ll go get your stuff from Marco’s—”

  “I appreciate the sentiment, really, because it’s very adult of you, but …” Kathy said, “I don’t want to just hop from Marco to you, all right? I—and, how do I say this?—I also have some concerns about your general ‘safety,’ you know? People like to shoot at you, Pete.”

  “Hear me out,” Pete said. “I’m not offering my place up as some kind of relationship barter, okay? I just want to make sure you’re healthy and rested and this baby gets everything it needs. As for us ... well, we’ll figure that out as we go, I guess? Or not. I’m not sure. But I don’t want you worrying about where you’re going to sleep or basic stuff like that. I’ll be there for you and the kid, no matter what. You will be safe.”

  Kathy nodded slowly, then stepped toward Pete. She pulled him into a stiff hug. “That’s good,” she whispered into his ear. “That’s a good start.”

  The research moved quickly, with Kathy and Pete taking one of the file cabinets each—sifting through the drawers methodically as the afternoon faded into early evening. The documents they found painted an incomplete picture—of a meticulous cop who diligently recorded every bit of information on every case he worked, but did little to record his life outside of the precinct.

  The files were divided into three categories, from what Pete and Kathy could tell: clippings from newspapers that might prove interesting in relation to an existing case, notes or jotted thoughts that might tie into a case Valdez was working on and, finally, handwritten notebooks that paired with specific police reports. Some cases—the more complicated ones that spanned years and remained unsolved—took up stacks of notebooks. The notebooks reminded Pete of the ones that filled his backpacks in middle school, Mead binders with wide lines and perforated edges.

  Valdez’s career had mirrored Pedro Fernandez’s in strange ways, Pete noticed. The cop had graduated to detective a few years before Graciela Fernandez’s body was found, and was assigned a number of cold cases, some partnered with Carlos Broche, Pete’s dad’s old partner and a man Pete had considered like a second father, at least until he’d uncovered the truth about him and his ties to the Silent Death over five years ago, during Pete’s first, hesitant case as an investigator. Valdez also seemed, unlike most of the Miami PD at the time, to be untarnished—a straight shooter who worked by the book and tried to keep his head down.

  “Anything yet?” Pete asked, not looking up from the piles of notebooks spread around his feet on the floor. “I’m getting lost in these cases, but none seem to connect to my mom.”

  “Nothing, no,” Kathy said, rummaging through the bottom drawer of the last cabinet. Their final shot. “It seems like he was looking into Los Enfermos back then, though, along with your dad and Broche, to a degree. Had some interesting theories.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, here,” she said, shuffling through some pages in a blue notebook. “He connects some of the early Silent Death’s murders—all drug killings, mind you, in the early 2000s—to Los Enfermos, which at the time were growing in power, thanks to their secret benefactor-slash-boss, Orlando Posada.”

  Orlando Posada had been a cop partnered with Gaspar Varela, another Miami officer, who spent years in prison for a murder he hadn’t committed. Varela had been framed by Posada in order to push out one of the department’s few good cops and minimize the chances of Posada’s own conspiracy being uncovered. Pete had managed to exonerate Varela a few years back, but at a steep price—the discovery that Varela’s own daughter, Maya, had been involved in the death of his wife. Posada never stood trial, gunned down by Pete in a standoff that almost cost Kathy her life and ended any chance of her unborn child surviving at the time.

  “The Silent Death killed for the highest bidder,” Pete said, turning to face Kathy. “Javier wasn’t affiliated with a particular gang.”

  The Silent Death case had brought Pete and Kathy together, and opened the door to a career as a private detective that Pete still found himself evading. Maybe it was time to accept what he’d become. What they’d become.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Kathy said. “I mean, wasn’t that guy Novo pretending to be the Silent Death when he attacked you and Emily?”

  “Or maybe he was the Silent Death,” Pete said. “The new one.”

  “Right, but like any good freelancer, I imagine Javier had preferred accounts—people he got steady work from,” Kathy said, standing up and stretching. “By the time he put on that freak suit, Los Enfermos were in full swing.”

  “So, you think Valdez was trying to connect those dots?”

  “It looks like it,” Kathy said. “But I’m not sure what that means, if true.”

  “It means it’s all tangled up, everything from the beginning,” Pete said. “The entire journey here has been tied up by this gang of killers. Every step of the way.”

  “That’s a bit melodramatic.”

  “But, think about it—the Silent Death was my first case. Los Enfermos were there. Posada framed Varela to hide Los Enfermos from notice. Los Enfermos killed my grandfather. La Iglesia de la Luz hires Los Enfermos to take us out when we get too close to finding out the truth ... and now this? How are they involved now? Are they even alive?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person, dear,” Kathy said. “I don’t keep track of who’s running what drug gang. I’d rather gouge my eyes out, or look at an electoral map.”

  “But don’t you see?” Pete said, as if seized by some sudden jolt of energy. Kathy inched back. “Los Enfermos have been involved since the beginning. With everything.”

  “I think we need a bit more proof that a multinati
onal gang of drug dealers has been out to get you since day one,” Kathy said. “And, sure, maybe Valdez was onto something—that Los Enfermos have been part of the fabric of this town for decades ... but what does that mean? Didn’t we know that?”

  “Not to this extent,” Pete said, standing up and pacing around the small room. “We thought—each time—that we’d cut off the head of the beast. First Posada. Then Lionel Oliva and La Iglesia de la Luz. But what if that was wrong? What if someone else has been in charge all this time?”

  “And ... what? We’ve just been knocking off his lieutenants and annoying him?” Kathy said. “Or her, to be fair.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, I would file that under ‘very bad,’” Kathy said. “It would also explain a lot. Specifically, as I noted, your continued bad luck when it comes to getting shot at. The whole dying for a while sucked, too.”

  Pete didn’t respond to Kathy’s joke, instead turning his attention to the last drawer. He pulled out what looked like a stack of three notebooks, two looking much like the dozens they’d flipped through before. The third, though, looked like something else. Something special.

  Pete scanned the first two notebooks before placing them off to the side with the others.

  “More case notes from Valdez, dated right before my mom died,” Pete said. “Was murdered.”

  “What’s that one?”

  “Not sure,” Pete said, cracking it open. “It’s bound ... looks like some kind of …”

  Pete took in a quick, sharp breath.

  “What?” Kathy asked, moving closer. “What is it?”

  She moved behind Pete, looking over his shoulder as he flipped through the pages.

  It was one of those expensive notebooks with a fancy leather cover that pretentious writer types used to jot down the first drafts of their great American novels. But instead of overwrought similes and watered-down Fitzgerald imitations, these pages were covered in what Kathy could best describe as art—collages, drawings, pastels, paints. Magazine picture cutouts, headlines, and lists and snippets of text in a flowery cursive hand. The drawings were vivid, sharply drawn and filled in with colored pencil, markers, and what had to be crayon, faded with age. The headlines were carefully cut from newspapers and magazines, the former yellowed and faded, the latter wrinkled and bent with age.

  Pete’s hand lingered on a spread near the middle of the book—a drawing of two people, one of them Pete’s father and the other, from what Pete could recall from photos, was supposed to be Graciela. Between them was a toddler. They were seated at a table, with a birthday cake in front of them. The boy had a small balloon in hand, a confused but happy look in his face, dark hair threatening to cover his eyes. The caption, hastily written under the detailed sketch, took Kathy’s breath away.

  “Memories from Pete’s 2nd birthday—1983.”

  THE DREAM BOOK veered from art project to cathartic diary with alarming speed. On one page, Graciela was listing the various places she and Diane would visit the following night; on the next, she’d spend a half-dozen pages sketching Pete and his father from memory, clearly pining for the normalcy and strength that had come with her home. But even these drawings—meant to evoke a security Graciela no longer had—were peppered with jarring images and jargon.

  You’re drinking too much.

  Don’t let Pete see you.

  Sleep it off.

  Are you drunk?

  Where were you last night?

  Pete stopped turning the pages when he reached a hyper-detailed self-portrait that was slashed twice in red marker, the words I CAN’T STOP scrawled in jagged script parallel to one of the lines. He closed the book and stood up. He’d seen enough.

  “Are you okay?”

  He ignored Kathy. He couldn’t deal with the inside of the book yet. He had to look at this as a detective first, a son second, if he had any chance of processing it all.

  “It’s a dream book,” she said.

  “A what?” Pete asked. His voice was off, shaken. His eyes were red, his posture wobbly. The dizziness he felt was new to him, unnatural, like he was losing control of himself with no hope of coming back.

  “Like, an art project,” Kathy said, taking the book from Pete gently and looking through it, spending a few seconds on each page. “You paste things that represent your dreams—snippets of words, images, things that reflect your state of mind. It’s something you use to stay creative, or to stay engaged with yourself, I guess. I used to do it a lot in college. I mean, it’s more than just that, but that’s the crux of what she was doing here, I think.”

  “But ... why does Osvaldo have this? Why did he have this?” Pete said, staring at the opposite wall, as if it’d open up and answer him. “And where is his notebook on the case?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve been sitting here for hours, flipping through pages and pages of the man’s work,” Pete said. “He was diligent. Meticulous. He kept journals on every single case he worked. Why didn’t he have one for my mom? And why did he have this?”

  Kathy nodded. She didn’t have an answer.

  “Let me see that again,” Pete said.

  She handed him the book. He started flipping through the pages, not reading, but scanning quickly—almost desperately.

  “There ... there are pages missing,” Pete said, showing the perforations from the notebook to Kathy. “Someone ripped out the last chunk of this.”

  “You really are a detective.”

  “Don’t you see, though?” Pete said, holding the book open, staring at the spot where the pages were torn out. “These pages could be the answer.”

  “Where are they, then?” Kathy asked. “I mean, maybe your mom tore them off herself?”

  “Possible, but this book seems so carefully crafted and meticulous,” Pete said, running a finger over the book’s cover. “It just feels out of place for her to do that.” He pulled out his cell phone and started to dial.

  “What are you doing?” Kathy asked.

  Pete ignored her. A few moments passed and he spoke. “Hey, it’s Pete, I’m putting you on speaker.” He pushed a button on his phone and placed it on a stack of manila envelopes between himself and Kathy. “Kathy’s here.”

  “What’s happening?” Nisha Hudson said, her voice distorted and distant-sounding. “You called me.”

  “Any leads on where our friend Beatriz de Armas is?” Pete asked.

  “Nothing concrete, but it’s obvious she fled the country,” Hudson said. “Aside from that, I can’t really comment. Ongoing investigation and all that.”

  “Got it, thanks,” Pete said. “Keep me posted if you can.”

  Hudson hung up.

  “What are you getting at?” Kathy asked.

  “Emily left a business card at the scene of Osvaldo’s murder,” Pete said. “She was there.”

  “Or someone wanted you to think she was there,” Kathy said.

  “True,” Pete said. “But that means whoever was there, whoever did leave that clue—could have a clue we need … those pages.”

  “I give you three stars,” Kathy said. “Good hunch, questionable follow-through.”

  Pete didn’t respond.

  She could tell her joke hadn’t landed right. She pulled him into a quick hug. “We will figure this out, okay?” Kathy said. “You’re doing it the right way—step by step. Now we know where to look next. Did you see anything else in that book?”

  Pete flipped to the back of the book, but found nothing else—just a few blank pages. He started to respond, but was interrupted by a slight knock on the door.

  Pete checked his watch. They’d been there almost four hours. It was close to ten in the evening. Kathy opened the door.

  “You guys about done?” Carmen asked expectantly. It was clear she wanted these two strangers out of her house. Pete understood. Her eyes danced around the room. It was mostly intact—anything taken out of the cabinets in neat piles around the space.

 
; “Yeah, yeah,” Pete said. “Thanks so much for letting us take over the space. Do, uh, do you mind if I borrow this?” He held up the dream book. He felt sweat on his palm, his fingers hot on the book’s leather binding.

  “Sure, that’s fine,” Carmen said. “I dunno what I’d use it for. I guess, um, just give it back? Eventually?”

  Pete nodded and followed Kathy out of the cramped space and down the home’s main hallway, Carmen behind them. She held the door as they filed out.

  “Thanks so much,” Kathy said, shaking Carmen’s hand.

  The woman nodded, her expression kind and genuine. “It’s fine, seriously, don’t sweat it,” she said. “I hope you found what you were looking for.”

  “Yes and no,” Pete said. “But it helped. A lot.”

  They exchanged a few more pleasantries and then said their goodbyes.

  Kathy led Pete to where she’d parked her car. “What now?” she asked as they walked down the front porch steps.

  He looked shaken, on edge, and confused. “We find Beatriz de Armas,” Pete said. “We find Emily. Then we get answers.”

  October 5, 1983

  GRACIELA FELT THAT nervous, sinking feeling again. Something wasn’t right.

  The problem was not with her, though she wasn’t exactly succeeding at life these days. No. With her job.

  She’d ignored the signs at first. The late-night deliveries. The guys in dark suits coming by every few days to talk to him. Her boyfriend, she thought at first, but even that was complicated and not right.

  But something else wasn’t right. This wasn’t standard operating procedure at a restaurant. She’d been a waitress before.

  She’d tried to ignore it tonight. Focus on wiping down the bar and counting the cash. But it was happening again. He went to the door first, a skip in his step. He wanted to be there before anyone else. He opened the door and blocked her line of sight. Graciela could only make out a figure in a dark suit.