Cult Following

by Donn Cortez

  “Just before Mulrooney was killed.”

  “Right. Whoever made the call saw Mulrooney bolt for the bathroom, called Sinhurma and let him know the sacrifice was on the altar—”

  “So to speak—”

  “—letting Sinhurma call Mulrooney. But why bother? What did Sinhurma have to say that was so important?”

  “It wasn’t what he said, Eric; it was probably some overblown, melodramatic statement along the lines of ‘You have failed me and now you’re going to die.’ No, the important thing for Sinhurma was that his voice was the last thing on earth Phillip Mulrooney heard…and that Mulrooney knew it.”

  “So what’s our next move?”

  “We get a search warrant for Ferra’s place. See if we can link him to the bow.”

  “He doesn’t live at the compound?”

  “Maybe he does now, but he listed a different address the first time we talked to him. Part of him still thinks of that place as home…and that’s the most likely place he’d go to hide something.”

  The address Ferra had given was his parents’ house in Hialeah, a stone’s throw from the famous racetrack. The neighborhood was primarily Cuban, the street filled with modest, red-tile-roofed suburban houses. Ferra’s parents, a short Cuban man with a well-groomed mustache and a stout woman with thick, tinted glasses, were indignant in the extreme when Horatio showed up with a patrol car and a warrant. The entire time he was searching, he could hear a steady torrent of outraged Spanish from outside; Horatio felt sorry for the patrolman who had to stand there patiently and endure it.

  The house was middle-class, homey, almost touchingly kitschy. The Ferras, it seemed, took their American citizenship very seriously; the roof sported a large flag and there was another in the front hall, plus an entire wall devoted to commemorative plates of U.S. Presidents. The Franklin Mint, Horatio thought, must love these people.

  He started with Julio Ferra’s bedroom. It had that distinctive look a child’s room gets when the occupant is in transition between teenager and adult: somewhere between abandoned and anticipatory, as if the room was holding its breath and afraid to exhale. A poster of the Miami Dolphins cheerleading squad and pennants from various sports teams adorned the walls; a Star Wars Millennium Falcon hung from a hook in the ceiling by a length of fishing line.

  That was Julio’s. The neatly made bed, the pictures of Julio carefully arranged on his spotless dresser—those were the parents’. Half discarded chrysalis, half shrine, Horatio thought. The Museum of the Empty Nest. Julio Ferra was in his early twenties, but it appeared as if his parents hadn’t quite let go yet.

  Oddly enough, this part of his job bothered Horatio more than dealing with bodies. It was his job to collect evidence, but any search of a residence, no matter how specific, wound up revealing much more about the person who lived there than you were after; Horatio had found more caches of pornography than he could count.

  Occasionally this was helpful—he’d nailed a child molester or two in just that way—but usually made him feel vaguely embarrassed, like he’d walked in on someone using the bathroom. Still, any piece of information might prove valuable, and so you collected as many of them as you could.

  He learned quite a lot about Julio Ferra. He learned that he collected baseball cards. He learned that he’d been a chubby child and a bigger teen. He learned that he’d won first place in an archery contest in summer camp when he was eleven, and that a girl named Marcia Spring had a crush on him his junior year of high school. He learned that he’d had a bow-hunting license since he turned nineteen, and that he liked to go hunting with his father.

  In the garage, he hit the jackpot.

  An old fiberglass recurve—probably from his summer camp days—and two compound bows hung on the wall from pegs. A quiver full of arrows was propped up in the corner. Horatio examined it critically without touching it; the arrows all appeared to be hand-fletched.

  “Bull’s-eye,” Horatio said.

  If anyone connected to the Vitality Method had ever done drugs, they’d never been arrested for it—not as far as Delko could find. The waiters, the cook, the dishwasher—none had ever been charged with anything related to narcotics. Albert Humboldt had a drunk-and-disorderly and Shanique Cooperville had been arrested once for shoplifting; the others, including Sinhurma himself, had no criminal record at all. If Sinhurma was connected to the drug trade, there was no evidence of it in his past.

  And then Delko remembered the plumber Calleigh had talked to. From what she’d said, he’d been pretty reluctant to give up his prints….

  He ran them through AFIS and got an immediate hit. Samuel Templeton Lucent, arrested for possession of a Schedule One drug: hashish.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he muttered. He gave Horatio a call on his cell. “Got a possible break in the Mulrooney case,” he told him. “The plumber that installed the new pipes was busted once for hash.”

  “Which connects him to the person at the restaurant who hid the knives, and the crime scene itself. Good. I’m coming in with some promising evidence myself. See you in a few.”

  Something else was nagging at Delko, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He stared into space and drummed his fingers on the desktop, then picked up his cell and made another call.

  “What’s up, Eric?” Wolfe answered.

  Delko briefly wondered if caller ID would eventually kill the word “hello.” “Where are you?”

  “On my way back to the lab from the restaurant. Got a box full of cutting implements to test for tool marks.”

  “The stove there—it runs on natural gas, right?”

  “I think so. It’s not electric, anyway.”

  “But it could be propane?”

  “I guess it’s possible. Why?”

  “You said hot-knifers sometimes use propane torches to heat the knives. Like the kind plumbers use for soldering pipes.” Delko filled Wolfe in on what he’d found on Samuel Lucent. “I’m going to scrape a little bit of the char off those knives and do a mass spec. It’ll tell us whether they were heated using propane or natural gas.”

  “Which means you want me to go back and check on the type of fuel the stove at the restaurant uses.”

  “Well, you’re closer than I am….”

  “You couldn’t have had this brainstorm fifteen minutes ago?” Wolfe sighed. “Okay, okay. I’ll double back.”

  Delko thanked him and hung up. He dug out the knives, scraped off a sample and sent it to Trace, then sat down in front of the computer.

  Delko, as he would freely admit, was more than a little competitive. He liked to push himself, both physically and intellectually—the challenge of figuring out what the evidence meant and how it fit together was one of the things that drove him and kept him interested in the job. He couldn’t help but see Wolfe as competition; Horatio certainly seemed to be taking the new CSI under his wing.

  So though there was no personal antagonism there it had irked him when Wolfe had known details about hot-knifing that Delko hadn’t. The fact that he might have missed a crucial piece of evidence as a result bothered him even more.

  So he did what he usually did when something bothered him—he got busy with research.

  He had shelves at home that were crammed floor to ceiling with reference material. Every time he moved to a new place, his friends all swore it was the last time they’d help unless he hauled all the damn books and magazines himself. “What,” they’d say, “you never heard of the Internet? You want to know something, just Google it.”

  It wasn’t that simple, of course—not everything was on the net, and even with his police clearance there were databases he couldn’t get into. But despite all the hard copy Delko owned, despite his rep as a hands-on, physical kind of guy, the Web was still one of his favorite CSI tools.

  Eric Delko was a certified police diver, the guy they called when they needed a body retrieved from a canal or a car hauled out of Biscayne Bay. He loved his work, even though ther
e was a certain grisly aspect to it that couldn’t be avoided—floaters were never pretty, and predation by everything from crabs to sharks always made things worse.

  But there was a silent beauty to being underwater that never went away. The rippling quality of light in the shallows when the sun was high and bright; the somber, green-hued mystery of the deeps, where anything could be just out of range of your vision. He’d been diving once off of West Palm Beach, checking out some coral, and turned around in time to see a humpback whale glide past no more than ten feet away. It was like being snuck up on by a Greyhound bus.

  There was something about surfing for data on the Web that reminded him of diving, something about the feeling of isolation and possibility. He always turned the sound down on any workstation he was using; he didn’t want to hear chimes and beeps and bursts of tinny music when he jumped from site to site, file to file. He preferred the feeling of quiet solitude, of floating alone in a sea of pure, weightless information, inhabited only by flickering schools of thought.

  Also, the next time the subject of hashish came up he intended to kick Wolfe’s butt.

  6

  “MISTER FERRA,” Detective Salas said. “Take a seat.”

  Julio Ferra sat down across from Horatio. He was in his early twenties, well-built, with dark hollows under his eyes and a prominent nose. His black hair was cut fashionably short, and he wore a small metal hoop in each earlobe—not earrings, disks with a hole punched in the center, like little steel doughnuts embedded in his flesh. When he turned his head the right way, light from the window would cast a tiny dot of illumination right through and onto his neck, giving the impression that a sniper was about to put a bullet through Ferra’s jugular. He wore the same blue shirt the rest of the Vitality Method patients did, at least while working—they’d pulled Ferra in from the clinic itself.

  He was also, Horatio noted, twitchy. Despite his obvious effort to appear relaxed, he had all the classic symptoms of someone with something to hide: he wouldn’t meet Horatio’s eyes, his body posture was tight and closed off, and his hands moved up to rub his chin or scratch his nose every time he answered a question. Salas had picked up on it too; she stood to one side and behind him, just out of his sight, trying to keep him off-balance. It was a technique Horatio had seen her use before—but then, they had questioned many a suspect together. It was always a subtle dance, a matter of cues and signals and intuition, not so much good cop/bad cop as an interrogation tango.

  “I understand you’re quite the archer,” Horatio said.

  “I used to be,” Julio said noncommittally.

  “Oh?” Salas said. She leaned in close and said, just a little too loudly, “You don’t shoot anymore?”

  “I don’t hunt, no. Killing animals for sport or food pollutes your karma.” His response had the ritual flavor of dogma, and Horatio knew he’d have to shake him off that track if he wanted anything but rote answers.

  “How about killing human beings? That okay with you?” he shot back.

  “What? No, of course not—”

  “Well, it’s funny, Julio. Two people you worked with have died in a very short period of time, and one of them was killed with an arrow fired by a compound bow. At this very minute, my investigators are examining a compound bow and some arrows we took from your parents’ garage…and what do you think they’re going to find?”

  Julio met his eyes and refused to look away—something many liars did, not realizing that overcompensation was just as telling. “You’ll find I used it recently,” he said, defiantly. “I still target shoot sometimes, at the clinic’s archery range. But that’s all.”

  “Sure,” Salas said. She’d moved, without making a sound, to his other side. “And where were you today at ten A.M.?”

  “I was at the clinic, doing some laps around the pool.”

  “You by yourself?” she asked.

  Julio glanced back at her and smiled. For just a second, Horatio could see the plump, happy kid in his parents’ collection of photos. “No. You watch televison?”

  It was an odd question, but Horatio had a sinking feeling he knew why Julio had asked it.

  “Not a lot, no,” Salas answered.

  “Then you should pick up a copy of TV Guide,” Julio said. “At ten o’clock I was hanging out with the guy on this week’s cover. And his girlfriend. She’s in this month’s Vogue, or maybe it was last month’s—I forget.”

  “I’ll check on that,” Horatio said mildly. He already knew Julio was telling the truth. “But even if that’s so, it doesn’t mean we’re done.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Doctor Sinhurma’s methods really worked for you—you used to tip the scales on the other side of two-fifty. That about right?”

  “I’m one seventy-five now. I do a hundred laps every day.” He sounded more wounded than defensive, but Horatio knew he had to get under his skin.

  “Sure, I can see that. You hang out with celebrities, you look good, you’re surrounded by people who appreciate you—it’s a shame that all has to end.”

  “You don’t have anything to charge me with,” Julio said, sounding a little confused.

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the clinic. It’s a shame, really—I can see that Doctor Sinhurma’s doing good work. But you have to understand, Julio, that there are certain people who don’t want that work to succeed.”

  Horatio paused, and shot Salas a meaningful look. The expression on her face told him she had no idea where he was going, but looked forward to finding out. Julio couldn’t see her response, but a spark of suspicion kindled in his eyes. “What people?”

  “People I answer to, Julio. This is Miami; you know how it works. One hand washes another, favors get done and then repaid. A man in my position…well, let’s just say I owe a lot of favors.” Horatio dropped his voice, ever so slightly. “So believe me when I say: Sinhurma is through. His message is just too threatening. I’ve been told to shut him down, and I’m afraid that’s what I’m going to do.” He put the barest note of regret into his voice.

  Cults, as Horatio knew, relied on emotional manipulation to instill a particular set of values into their members. There were several themes that were almost always used: that the leader of the cult possessed mystical knowledge he could pass on to his followers and it would make them happy forever; that the members of the cult were special people, and only the cult had the wisdom to recognize that; that dark forces in high places hated the cult and wanted to tear it apart, and only through the utmost loyalty of its members could it survive.

  Emotional manipulation worked both ways, though…and Horatio intended to play Julio’s artificially instilled paranoia against him for all it was worth.

  “You can’t do that,” Julio said. He sounded disbelieving, but what Horatio wanted was shock.

  “Waco,” Horatio said softly. He met Julio’s eyes, willed him to believe it, tried to project sincerity and just a touch of sadness. “Ruby Ridge…”

  “The Branch Davidians,” Salas added.

  “No!” Julio said, and Horatio knew he had him.

  “That’s crazy!” Julio blurted. “Those places were cults! The Vitality Method is a medical clinic—”

  “Cut the crap, Julio,” Horatio snapped. “Just a clinic? Do you think we’re all idiots? Did you really think the power of what Sinhurma’s saying wouldn’t get noticed? Did you?”

  Julio’s eyes had the wide, trapped look of an animal that doesn’t know which way to run, but Horatio couldn’t afford the luxury of feeling sorry for him. “I know, and you know, about what’s really going on out there. Transformation.” Horatio paused and leaned forward, ever so slightly. “You’re not the same person you were when you first arrived there. That’s obvious. And that kind of radical, transformative change is exactly what certain people don’t want….”

  Julio’s nod looked a lot like a nervous twitch, but Horatio could see he agreed. “But—but we’re not a cult,” he tried agai
n. “We have people—famous people—who come there for treatment. There’s no way—”

  “Those people are being warned right now,” Horatio said. “Do you really think they’ll put their lives on the line? They’re not like you, Julio; they’re already rich and attractive and popular. How many of them actually live at the compound like you do?”

  “None of them,” he admitted.

  “That’s right. They don’t have the level of commitment you do—they don’t really understand.” Horatio got up, walked over to the window and stared out through the grid of hexagons. He waited.

  “There’s—there’s got to be something you can do.”

  “I wish there was,” Horatio sighed. “I really do. But two people have died, Julio; that’s not the kind of thing that gets swept under the carpet. If I could just give them the murderer, they might be satisfied; you’d get a lot of bad press, but that’s better than being annihilated by a SWAT team armed with riot shotguns….”

  “I—I don’t know anything about the murder. My bow was at the clinic for—for a while. Anyone could have borrowed it.”

  And right after the murder it went straight back to your parents’ garage? went through Horatio’s mind, but he let it stay there. Okay, so he won’t give up the killer—doubted if he would anyway. Let’s see if I can pry something else out instead.

  “I know what’s going through your mind,” Horatio said, turning around. “You’re thinking about sacrificing yourself. That’s commendable, but it won’t work. You’ve got an airtight alibi, remember?”

  The flash of guilt on Julio’s face told Horatio that hadn’t been exactly what he was thinking…which was good. The better the kid’s instinct of self-preservation, the better Horatio’s chances of making a deal.

  “It’s too bad,” Horatio said. “The feeling that I got from the higher-ups is that they’d settle for a good scandal. I think the Vitality Method’s strong enough to survive a little bad publicity myself, but I’m not the one calling the shots.”