Dead Last

by James W. Hall

  “You a bike rider like Flynn?”

  “I’m not part of that group. No, I’m not a bike rider.”

  “And you and Sawyer? How you two get along?”

  Jeff was ready for that one and didn’t flinch.

  “I’m friendly with everyone in the Moss family—Garvey, April, Flynn, and Sawyer. All of them.”

  “You ever use prosthetic makeup? You know, a latex mask from a mold of your face.”

  “What the hell?” Frank put a hand on Thorn’s arm and squeezed. “What’re you doing?”

  Matheson was chewing on something that hadn’t been there before. Moving his jaws with his lips tight like maybe his mouth was filling with spit.

  “You’re their dad, aren’t you?” Matheson was smiling as if he reveled in trading blows with complete strangers. “You’re the father who never was.”

  Frank stepped away from Thorn and looked back and forth between him and Matheson.

  “You notice the resemblance, or someone clue you in?”

  “Those boys desperately needed a father growing up. They needed someone to show them how to be real men.”

  “Everybody needs a father,” Thorn said.

  “Now it’s too late,” Jeff said. “Sawyer and Flynn are set in stone.”

  Frank’s cell phone jingled and he pulled it out, gave Thorn a look to shut the fuck up, and stepped over to a corner of the room to take the call.

  “I’m a professional killer,” Jeff said. “I’ve murdered more animals this month than you’ve seen in your entire life. An hour ago I was shaking duck eggs, destroying them before they were even hatched. Shaking them, not breaking them.”

  “Must be a kick,” Thorn said.

  “Condo full of geezers, gated community next to a golf course, the golf course ducks come over from the ponds and shit on the old folks’ sidewalks and their cars, it drives them crazy, a big nuisance, so they called me.

  “I located the nests and I shook twenty-nine eggs this morning. I could’ve smashed them, sure, but when the ducks come back, find the broken eggs, they just build another nest and lay more. But if you shake the eggs, scramble the yolks, and put them back in the nest like you found them, the ducks’ll keep sitting on the damn things for another year and never realize anything’s wrong. That’s how stupid they are. Sitting on dead eggs.”

  Jeff was wearing a rumpled shirt and dirty cargo shorts. The office had a damp, underground smell like the burrow of a mole.

  “We were talking about prosthetic makeup. Flynn tells me you two used to play with his mom’s cosmetics?”

  “He told you that?”

  “Said she locked you out of her bedroom.”

  “You sit on dead eggs, don’t you? You just sit and sit and sit, waiting for something to happen. Dumb as a duck. You think I’m going to answer a question like that? That’s how dumb you are. You just keep waiting, keep sitting on that egg, see if I ever answer it.”

  “Maybe you just did.”

  “Okay, copper, time’s up. You want to talk to me again, get a warrant. And bring backup. It’ll take more than you two to handle me.”

  Frank clicked off the phone, nabbed his jacket off the chair, and took Thorn by the shirtsleeve and hauled him to the door.

  Thorn shot Matheson a parting look, but the kid had sunk away into his boundless tranquility, arms resting on the desk, his imperturbable smile securely back in place.

  Outside at the car, Frank put his coat on and looked at Thorn over the roof of the Taurus.

  Behind Frank a great blue heron landed on the roof of an adjacent building and looked down at them. Four feet tall, six-foot wingspan. Great blues laid six or seven eggs per clutch; maybe half of them hatched. Not a bad ratio for a big bird living in the wild. The blue looked bereft up there, a long way from the watery plains where she hunted and made her home. Maybe she’d been living in somebody’s artificial lake and made the mistake of shitting on their car and they’d called a guy like Matheson to come rattle her eggs. Just because the bird was majestic didn’t give her a pass. Not around this town.

  Frank followed Thorn’s line of sight and the heron lifted off. Back to its search for a swath of green.

  “Scratch one off our list,” Frank said.

  “Who? Matheson?”

  “Miss Dollimore,” he said. “A few miles east of Boca Chita, out in the Atlantic, the young lady went over the side of their yacht. Gus and Sawyer were up on the flybridge at the time, didn’t notice. Claim they only realized she was missing when they were back at the marina. Some fisherman hauled her body out a half hour ago, called Marine Patrol.”

  “Jumped?”

  “Jumped, fell, or pushed,” Frank said. “Unless you can think of another way a thing like that might happen.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  BACK IN THE CAR, FRANK called Agent Rivlin, told her to start looking for a judge, get started on a search warrant. When he was finished with her, he was silent, waiting until the first red light to ask Thorn what the hell was going on back there at Matheson’s office. That whole thing with fathers and sons.

  Thorn settled back in his seat and gave Frank the short version of his one-day fling with April Moss, his newly discovered sons, Sawyer and Flynn. Frank listened without comment, not looking over as Thorn finished.

  He drove for a few blocks in silence, then said, “Which explains the baseball gloves.”

  “I know it’s pathetic,” Thorn said.

  “What was she, about twelve when this happened?”

  “She was eighteen.”

  “You just made it under the wire.”

  “What can I say?”

  “Try saying nothing for a while. How’s that strike you?”

  Then Frank launched into a thirty-minute lecture during the rest of the drive from Matheson’s office to the Ocean Club on Brickell, where the Dollimores lived, a stern speech about everything Thorn had done wrong with Matheson, and how close Frank was to banishing him back to Key Largo, forbidding him to enter the Miami city limits ever again. Thorn had to admit, Sheffield had a point. His goddamn cannon had come loose again.

  The only argument he might make on his own behalf, and he had the smarts not to try to make it, was that this was Thorn’s tried-and-true interview method. Forget the curveball, the knuckler, the change-up; forget nuance and trickery. Thorn’s approach: Surprise them with your best heat up the middle, test their reaction times. The absolute opposite of Frank’s control game.

  Frank’s lecture worked. Thorn shut the hell up. Let the pro handle it. Frank took charge, spoke to the building manager, commandeered the tenth-floor rec room of the Ocean Club, three doors down from apartment 1047, the condo Dee Dee had been sharing with Sawyer. He spoke with the forensics team waiting outside Dee Dee’s condo for the search warrant to arrive. Then he came into the rec room and took Sawyer’s statement and took it again and then a couple of more times. All of it recorded on a little handheld silver jewel he produced from his jacket pocket.

  From three o’clock to six, three hours straight, Thorn didn’t say a word. He watched and listened to Frank Sheffield debriefing Sawyer Moss, and he spent some time rewinding the day in his head, but mainly he watched Frank work, watched and listened to Sawyer responding.

  Sheffield patiently tried to trip up Sawyer Moss. Thorn’s first real opportunity to meet this son was coming in this twisted moment. The kid wore a blue ventilated boating shirt and shorts and Sperry Top-Siders. Sunglasses hung from a cord around his neck. Face chapped from the afternoon’s trip across the bay. Blond hair a mess.

  Three hours. Same questions, different phrasing, different order, different pacing, Sawyer with the same answers, slight variations, a word here and there, being patient with Frank, as though he knew this drill, was trying his best to cooperate, do his civic duty. Patient, reasonable, seemed like a good kid.

  Gus, the grieving father, was upstairs in his penthouse covering the same ground with Frank’s team, Grace Rivlin and Robert Vasquez. They
would compare stories later, see what fit, what didn’t. A routine that Thorn guessed hadn’t altered since the heyday of the inquisitions.

  How anybody as relaxed and jocular as Frank could tolerate such plodding tedium was beyond Thorn. Sugarman was capable of it too. He’d seen Sugar plenty of times grind away at some doofus, playing Simon Says with him till, whoops, the doofus accidentally spilled the truth.

  Going at it like some stubborn woodpecker tapping at the same spot for endless hours, probing for the weak fiber, working his way in, convinced there was something worth all his time and effort hiding back behind that hard shell.

  Sawyer wasn’t sure whether Dee Dee’s fall overboard was a suicide or a fall. Frank didn’t bring up the third alternative, just let Sawyer talk.

  Dee Dee had seemed strange lately, but not particularly depressed. She’d been drinking heavily that afternoon, so it easily could’ve been an accident. Sawyer, the scriptwriter, came up with a scenario. She might’ve come out onto the deck for some fresh air, but instead of it making her feel better, she’d looked out at the rising and falling horizon, her seasickness had turned worse, and she’d puked over the side; had leaned out, lost her balance, and tumbled in.

  She didn’t swim, wouldn’t even go into the wading pool at the condo. Maybe it happened like that, an accident. A slip. And if she’d called out for help, even right below them, twenty, thirty feet away, Gus and Sawyer wouldn’t have heard her calls over the engine roar, the blast of wind, their own voices. And they were hauling ass most of the time, forty knots, they’d be a mile away in a minute or so, enough time for Dee Dee to slip below the surface.

  The way Sawyer told it, the last time either of them saw Dee Dee alive was when Gus went below to relieve himself. According to Gus, she was watching TV, sucking on a bottle of rum, feeling queasy from the rolling seas and pouty like she got sometimes. Telling Gus he was making a big mistake, taking a cruise on a day when they should’ve been hanging at the condo waiting by the phones for the media schedulers to call about appearing on the morning shows.

  Moody, testy, but not suicidal, Sawyer said. Though, yes, she had been behaving suspiciously in the last few weeks. And there were other things that made her father and her boyfriend start to worry she might be involved in these killings. Gus and Sawyer had talked it over and decided they had to share their concerns with the authorities. A hard decision they’d made out on the yacht.

  What were those other suspicious things? Frank wanted to know. And then once he’d heard them, he wanted to hear them again, and then again.

  For one, Dee Dee surprised Sawyer just that morning; before she came into the bedroom for more hanky-panky, she’d hollered for him to shut the blinds, something they never did. Never? Frank asked it blandly. As if he’d heard that one a hundred times, exhibitionists putting on a show for the voyeurs in adjacent condos. Never, Sawyer repeated, we never shut the blinds, then repeated it again as though he didn’t quite believe it himself. Never.

  When Sawyer had the blinds closed, Dee Dee strolled out in a black Zentai suit and hunched over in a threatening pose, hands behind her back as though she was hiding a gun or a baseball bat. It rattled the kid.

  Thorn kept watching his son, listening for the squeaky giveaway in his voice, waiting for the telltale swallow, a lump of worry that wouldn’t go down, some revealing sweat glistening on the upper lip, anything that would suggest Sawyer Moss was doing anything but telling the flat honest truth.

  Thorn saw, heard, smelled nothing of that sort. From where he sat the young man seemed to be earnest, tender, and tough. Sawyer was shocked and pained by Dee Dee’s drowning, but his reaction seemed proportional. Not trying too hard on anything. Not trying to convince, or overexplain. Getting a worried crinkle in his forehead when he recounted his growing misgivings about the girl he was shacking up with.

  It wasn’t just the Zentai suit. It started way before today.

  How she’d been behaving for a while, beginning right after she learned Miami Ops was in danger of being cancelled. The very day, in fact, she found that out, she’d just finished doing a scene in which she’d strangled an old geezer in a hospital bed and left behind an obituary on his bedside table. Dee Dee was playing the part of the show’s Zentai Killer. Two days after strangling Slattery, the real-life murders started with the death of the elderly gentleman in Hialeah.

  Was there a connection? Sawyer didn’t know. He couldn’t believe it at first, but now he wasn’t sure. Maybe Dee Dee was that desperate after all. Maybe he didn’t know her as well as he thought. She was superobsessive about her career, about succeeding in the business.

  He admitted he felt guilty about all of this because the Zentai storyline had all been his idea. He’d just stumbled across the Lycra suits somewhere while surfing the Web, he couldn’t even recall where now, and decided to try to work them into the show. The suits were creepy and distinctive, and in retrospect he thought maybe it was one of the things that helped sell the series to the studio in the first place.

  Sawyer apologized for going down that blind alley. He knew this wasn’t about him. Not about him, but about what Dee Dee did, and maybe why she did it. Overcome with guilt, sensing the cops closing in, sensing that her own father and lover were starting to suspect.

  Or hell, maybe she just fell overboard. Maybe it was that.

  Going back to his growing mistrust of her, Sawyer described the previous night when the Zentai Killer called the Herald, and the Oklahoma sheriff was killed, how Dee Dee was nowhere to be found. Didn’t answer her cell. Wasn’t at the Merrick gym in the Gables, where she spent long hours on the machines; not at dinner, not with Gus, missed a date with Sawyer. Same thing when he was away in Dallas. She said she’d switched off her cell.

  And there was that time when they were leaving the airport after the Dallas trip, and she told Sawyer she wanted him to write more murders into the scripts. She said she liked killing people. The more he went over these last few weeks, the more troubled he got.

  Like the hours in the aftermath of Buddha’s murder. Dee Dee was elated. Lit up by the prospect of major media attention. Ghoulishly overjoyed the show was going to be a hit. She knew exactly what she was going to do with all that cash. Not even a hint of empathy.

  And then there were the weekends. She’d been disappearing lately, cell phone switched off. Sawyer had worried she might be fooling around with some guy, but then he started thinking about the killings, all of them taking place on the weekends.

  It didn’t sound like much to Thorn. Maybe a tad narcissistic and amoral on the girl’s part, but he suspected it was more or less typical of show biz people, along with other terminally ambitious types whose career arc was their highest concern.

  He listened and waited for something that would nail it down, prove beyond any doubt that Dee Dee was the killer. Wanting this to be the certifiable conclusion so he could escape and return to his island life and start rebuilding. Tie some new flies, start searching out the latest spots where the big daddy tarpons were hiding.

  Listening to Frank and Sawyer going at it for hours, his mind wandered to that great blue heron on the roof of a shop in the industrial park. A bird out of its natural element. Looking forlorn and dead tired. Thorn identified with that big gawky bird, a kindred spirit, both of them displaced from their habitat.

  Then it gut-punched him, made him groan. He was never going to be able to retreat completely to Key Largo. No complete separation from Miami ever again. He had two grown sons, and that blood connection with Sawyer and Flynn was never going away. Like it or not, he was bound to this rancorous city for as long as those two chose to live here.

  How about Gus? Frank was asking Sawyer.

  “What about him?” Sawyer sounding shifty for the first time.

  “He and Dee Dee close? Like, do they have a happy, healthy, normal father-daughter thing going?” Frank was fiddling with his recorder, his eyes on the tiny machine in what looked like a gambit—trying to distract from the
question’s weight.

  “I’m in no position to judge normal father-offspring relationships,” Sawyer said.

  Thorn leaned back in his chair, waiting for the kid to look over at him and acknowledge the zinger. He didn’t. He kept his eyes on Sheffield, who kept his eyes on his little recording gizmo.

  “Dee Dee ever mention anything weird going on between them? Tension, disagreements, problems of any kind?”

  Sawyer worked his lips, then seemed to catch himself. Letting his mouth relax, giving Thorn a quick look to see if he was paying attention. Thorn sent him an encouraging smile.

  “I guess they had issues like any parent and child,” Sawyer said. “Nothing out of the normal range.”

  “Nothing out of the normal range.” Frank looked up from the recorder.

  “That’s right.”

  “When you last saw Dee Dee, she was drinking rum, down in the salon, did she say anything to you? Indicate how she was feeling.”

  “She said her stomach was upset. She was feeling woozy.”

  Sawyer shifted in his chair. His butt probably hurting as much as Thorn’s from sitting three hours solid.

  “You need some coffee, a sandwich? I can order something up.”

  “No, nothing. I’m fine.”

  “So we’re talking about Gus. Him and his daughter. You never sensed anything going on there that made you uncomfortable?”

  Sawyer looked down, shook his head.

  That was a lie, that silent head shake.

  Thorn could see it so plainly he wanted to take the kid by the arm and give him a rattle to get him back on track, remind him that he was dealing with a professional interrogator who’d spent his life listening to dirtbags lie. If Thorn could spot it, Frank had spotted it for sure.

  “So, okay,” Frank said. “We’re almost done.”

  Sawyer breathed in and out, keeping his face neutral, eyes on Frank. But Thorn could see his mother’s sympathetic nervous system betraying him, the color stealing up his throat into his cheeks.

  “So you never knew about Gus making skin flicks, him and Dee Dee in bed together.”