Diagnosis Murder: The Death Merchant

by Lee Goldberg

  All the devices he planted were energy parasites powered by their hosts. No need to worry about batteries. In all, he left close to $50,000 in electronics behind in Mark Sloan's house. He thanked Danny Royal for so kindly offsetting that unexpected expense out of petty cash.

  When Wyatt finished with the house, he moved into the garage, bugged Mark's Saab convertible, and planted a satellite tracking device under the hood. Wyatt would rely on the Defense Department's array of satellites to pinpoint Mark Sloan's location at any time and relay it to his wireless handset.

  Your tax dollars at work, Wyatt thought.

  He wouldn't have to risk tailing Mark Sloan; he'd just listen to everything the doctor said and track all his movements from the safety, distance, and anonymity of a computer screen.

  Whatever Mark knew or found out now, Wyatt would know it, too.

  Mark Sloan's last night on Kauai was spent struggling to sleep, unable to quiet his thoughts, unable to stop thinking about the mystery of Danny Royal.

  Who was Danny Royal?

  A very smart, very cool-headed individual. Smart enough not only to take a great deal of someone's money, but to know how to disappear afterward.

  A man who never relaxed, who never lowered his guard, never letting anyone into his life, living, in every regard, only on the surface. Even his house was utterly devoid of a personality, except for a few crossword puzzle magazines.

  With that thought, Mark sat up, got out of bed, and turned on the lamp on the bedside table. He found the stack of recipe cards he took from the Royal Hawaiian, picked out the one that matched the card they'd found in the safe-deposit box, and wrote on it:

  Re: Ideal Oven, Ask Jim Lowe. A loose, trendy cook

  It seemed pretty straightforward. A note about someone to contact about a piece of kitchen equipment and a chef. But what if it was something more? An anagram, perhaps?

  So for three hours Mark tried reorganizing the letters of the first sentence into other possible sentences, but came up with nothing that made any sense.

  Deliverance: I'm a Jello Owl.

  We laced a vermilion jello.

  Cleveland: Wire Joel a Limo.

  We've corralled a mini jello.

  Lo, a medicinal jewel love,

  A love Jew cleared a million.

  A vile medical jello owner

  In frustration, he removed the re: from the mix, but still couldn't come up with anything any more sensible or even grammatical.

  A Camino leveled Jill, Ow.

  A clean evil willed mojo.

  Jill menaced a olive owl.

  A cajoled ill evil woman.

  He had even less luck when he moved on to the second sentence of the note: A loose, trendy cook

  If Mark had a computer, he figured he could probably come up with a thousand more senseless combinations of words out of what was scrawled on Danny's recipe card.

  Maybe the note wasn't a puzzle. It just was what it was— a note about a guy to call for a deal on ovens and a good chef—and he was obsessing over nothing.

  Then again, Danny was referring to a trendy cook rather than a chef. It seemed odd. The distinction between a chef and a cook wasn't major, and merely one of perception, but it would certainly make a difference to a man running an elegant restaurant as opposed to a diner. Wouldn't Danny Royal have preferred a trendy chef over a trendy cook?

  Mark turned off the light, got back into bed tried to sleep. But again the questions kept coming.

  What was Danny Royal running from? Where was he running from? Whom was he running from?

  Whom? Now, there was an interesting question. Finding Danny couldn't have been easy, not if it took five years to happen. And that had to be expensive. So whoever it was had deep pockets, patience, and an infinite capacity for vengeance.

  And what about the killer? Mark doubted it was the aggrieved individual. This had to be the work of a hired hand. A professional who wanted to make Danny's death look like an accident.

  A shark attack, of all things.

  So the killer was a professional who wasn't afraid of challenges. He probably relished them.

  Whoever the killer was, he had to get scuba gear, a boat, a tiger shark fin. And he'd probably been on the island for a while, watching Danny and learning his habits. Somewhere along the line, the killer must have left some kind of clue, some trace of his existence and his movements. Nobody is invisible.

  Mark made some notes on the hotel notepad, reminding himself of things to ask Kealoha to look into when they met for the last time tomorrow.

  It wasn't going to be easy walking away from this mystery, but Mark had to concede, as he finally drifted off to sleep, that he'd run out of leads.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Three hours before their flight back home, Mark and Steve stopped at the police station in Lihue to say good-bye to Sgt. Kealoha and see if there were any new developments in the case.

  They walked in to find Kealoha and two other detectives going over the paperwork from the accountant and the bank. Kealoha was wearing the clothes he'd had on the day before and looked like he hadn't slept much, if at all.

  Mark took a few sheets of paper, torn from his hotel notepad, from his shirt pocket. "I came up with some possible avenues of investigation and some questions you might want to look into."

  "First, let me tell you everything we've found out since yesterday," Kealoha said, pointing to a blank dry-erase board mounted on the wall.

  "That much?" Steve said.

  "Impressive, huh? Turns out Danny Royal's social security number is legit. We traced the number back to Danny Royal of Summit, New Jersey, who was a law-abiding citizen and regular taxpayer right up until the time he died six years ago."

  "Figures," Steve said.

  "We got some clean prints off Danny's wallet and passports and ran them through AFIS, coming up blank,"

  Kealoha said. "Whoever he was, he never served in the military, law enforcement, or spent time in the pokey."

  Kealoha motioned to the two tired men behind him, both of whom were on the phone. "We've checked out Royal's credit card statements and phone bills. All he bought on the card were small things from local merchants—no plane trips or anything that might have given us a lead. Virtually all of his phone calls have been to suppliers or local hotels and residences, presumably to confirm dinner reservations."

  "Did Jim Lowe's number show up in any of those calls?" Mark asked.

  "Not so far." Kealoha said, "though he could work for one of the vendors, or be somebody who just came in to eat at Danny's restaurant one night."

  "You get anything off the calls from Danny's house?" Mark asked.

  "Almost all of them were to his restaurant or to local hotels."

  "Any long-distance calls?" Steve asked.

  "Only from the restaurant, and those we've tracked to vendors he was doing business with."

  Steve nodded. "He was careful, all right."

  Mark offered his notes to Kealoha again. "Perhaps we've let ourselves get distracted by focusing on who Danny Royal is rather than how he was killed."

  "I'm going to contact dive shops, see if I can track who rented or bought scuba equipment over the last week, and check with the airlines, see who brought dive stuff along with them," Kealoha said. "I'm also checking every boat rental place on the island and going over any reports of stolen or missing watercraft reported over the last two weeks. Plus, I'm talking to sport fishermen to see if anyone was asking about buying shark fins."

  Mark crumpled up his notes and tossed them in a nearby trash can. "You're good, Ben."

  "I don't often get a chance to shine," Kealoha said.

  Mark held out his hand. "It's been a pleasure meeting you. Good luck on the case."

  Kealoha shook his hand. "Ho, az nuts, Doc. Deah wooda be no case witout you, brah. An den da akamai killer wooda fooled us lolo mokes. We tanks planny." He grinned at Mark's blank look. "We owe you one, Dr. Sloan."

  "That's what I thought you s
aid." Mark grinned back. "Either that, or you said I had hazelnuts in my suitcase. I'll let you know as soon as those sketches come in from the forensic anthropologist."

  Steve shook Kealoha's hand. "Gimme a call, brah. We'll talk story, shoots?"

  "Shoots, brah, dun deal," Kealoha replied with a grin. Then he added, "You do realize you sound ridiculous trying to talk pidgin, right?"

  "You think that's bad," Steve said, "you ought to hear me Jive."

  As they turned to leave, Mark gave Steve a look and whispered, "Do people still jive anymore?"

  "Hell if I know," Steve replied.

  The breakfast crowd at BBQ Bob's mostly tended to be people who looked like stereotypical truckers; thick-necked, heavyset men and women in jeans and faded shirts and baseball caps. They were drawn to a breakfast menu of eggs and potatoes served up with thick slabs of steak, bacon, ham, pork, or sausage, slathered in butter and grease, and, on request, ass-kicking barbeque sauce.

  It wasn't the healthiest of diets, unless you happened to be a strict adherent of a low-carb, protein-rich lifestyle, which none of the patrons were.

  Knowing all that, Dr. Jesse Travis often wondered if he was violating his Hippocratic oath by co-owning the place and serving heaping platters of cholesterol to people. He tried to appease his guilty conscience by adding granola, fruit cups, and cottage cheese to the breakfast menu, but so far the only people who ever ordered them were the waitresses and, occasionally, Dr. Amanda Bentley and Jesse's girlfriend, Susan Hilliard.

  Of course, Amanda, being a pathologist and medical examiner, and Susan, being a nurse, both knew better than to eat up the "hot death" BBQ Bob's served.

  "It's not hot death," Jesse corrected Amanda, who sat at the counter, sipping a cup of coffee and regarding the customers. "It's a hearty breakfast."

  "It hearty all right," she said. "It goes straight to the coronary arteries."

  "How can you say that? The cowboys and explorers and homesteaders and farmers who made this country great, who road horseback over mountain ranges, through snowstorms, and across blistering deserts, they ate like this."

  "They also treated fevers by bleeding people and prescribed mercury as a laxative," Amanda said. "Should we still be doing that, too?"

  It wasn't easy for Jesse to argue a medical point he didn't believe in. But as a businessman, he believed in catering to the culinary desires of his customers. He had a lucrative breakfast business going, something few barbeque joints could boast about, and he didn't want to lose it. His customers wanted meat, grease, and butter, and in large quantities, so that's what he gave them.

  Besides, he hated it when Amanda lectured him. Especially when she was right

  Jesse admired and respected the bright, bubbly, African-American woman. She was a brilliant pathologist, a respected medical examiner, and an attentive single mother of a five-year-old boy, a feat she pulled off by being extraordinarily organized, practical, and focused. It was how she managed her life so efficiently and, in Jesse's opinion, how she tried to manage everyone else's.

  "People like a breakfast that sticks to their ribs," Jesse said, hoping it didn't come out as defensive whining and certain that it did.

  "And their waistlines and their butts," Amanda said, barely stifling a smile. "Look at these people. It's sticking all over them."

  "You know what you are?" Jesse wagged a finger at her. "A food prude."

  "A what?"

  "A food prude," Jesse said. "If people don't eat like you, if they don't graze on weeds all day and swallow handfuls of vitamins like peanuts, they're barbarians or fatsoes."

  Amanda thought about it for a moment. "You swallow peanuts by the handful? No wonder you think you're serving a balanced breakfast here."

  Jesse groaned in frustration and disappeared into the kitchen. Amanda grinned to herself and finished her coffee just as Mark and Steve came in, all tan and rested from their vacation.

  Well, they were tan, anyway, Amanda thought. They didn't look very rested.

  "Welcome back," Amanda said, as they slid onto stools on either side of her.

  "Have you been giving Jesse hell?" Steve asked.

  "I've been doing my part," Amanda said. "But I guess I can ease up a little now that you're back. How was the trip?"

  "It was great for a while," Steve said.

  "Especially toward the end," Mark said.

  Steve snorted derisively. "Speak for yourself."

  "What happened?" Amanda asked.

  "He found a murder to investigate," Steve said.

  "Why am I not surprised?" Amanda said. "What did he do, scan the paper each day looking for homicides he could intrude on? How many crime scenes did he show up at un invited?"

  "Why are you talking about me like I'm not here?" Mark said. "It's not like I go looking for murders to get involved in."

  Steve and Amanda both turned and looked at him. Mark shifted self-consciously on his stool.

  "Well, not this time I didn't," Mark said, motioning to Steve. "You could back me up on this."

  "I could," Steve said, making no effort to do so.

  Jesse emerged from the kitchen and broke out in a huge smile when he saw Steve and Mark at the counter. "Hey, how was the vacation?"

  "It was murder," Steve said. "As usual."

  Amanda could see Jesse was confused. "Mark got involved in a homicide investigation."

  Jesse gave Mark a chastising look. "On your vacation? You just can't help yourself, can you? What were you thinking?"

  Amanda held out her hand, palm open, to Jesse, who sighed, reached into his pocket, and handed her a crumpled $20 bill.

  "You had a bet?" Mark asked, astonished.

  She shrugged. "It was a sucker bet." Amanda smiled at Jesse. "And I found a sucker."

  Jesse glared at Steve. "Why couldn't you control him? He's your father."

  "To be fair," Steve said. "It wasn't entirely his fault. The guy was attacked by a shark right in front of us."

  Jesse looked incredulously at Mark. "You were investigating a shark for murder?"

  "It was a bit more complicated than that," Mark said.

  "It already sounds complicated," Amanda said.

  While Steve went back into the kitchen to get their breakfast order going, Mark began filling Amanda and Jesse in on their investigation into Danny Royal's murder and the dead ends they ran into so far. By the time his story was done, Mark and Steve had finished their breakfast and were sipping their coffee.

  "Which forensic anthropologist did you give the photos and measurements of Danny's face to?" Amanda asked.

  "Claire Rossiter," Mark replied.

  "She's the best," Amanda said. "If it's okay with you, I'll give Dr. Aki a call in Kauai, and see if he'll fax me his report. I'd like to work with Claire on this."

  "I'd appreciate it," Mark said.

  "Wait a minute," Steve said, pushing his empty coffee cup aside. "Now you're getting into this, too?"

  Amanda frowned. "I'm just assisting."

  "No one asked you to," Steve said, then glared at his father. "Or you either. It's not our case, it's a Kauai Police investigation, and they're handling it."

  "What difference does it make to you if Amanda and Mark want to volunteer their time and expertise?" Jesse asked.

  "Because it inevitably means I'm going to get dragged into it, too," Steve said. "I don't mind that if it's an LAPD case. Well, I do mind, but I've learned to live with it. This is actually meddling. You have no legitimate reason to be involved."

  "Sgt. Kealoha doesn't have a lot of resources available to him," Mark said. "I don't think he'll care if we lend him some of ours."

  "Ah ha!" Steve slapped the table. "That's exactly what I'm talking about. What resources did you have in mind?"

  Mark tapped his head with an index finger and smiled. "Just what I was born with."

  Steve narrowed his eyes accusingly. "What about Amanda? You've already got her going over the autopsy reports from Kauai and assisting the forensic a
nthropologist in a facial reconstruction."

  "I volunteered," she said. "Remember?"

  "Don't you see?" Steve said to her. "That's how it starts. Pretty soon you're devoting all your waking hours, and the hours you're not supposed to be awake, to chasing down his hunches. It's insidious."

  "And it's fun," Jesse said, turning to Mark. "What can I do?"

  Jesse was always eager to help, gladly volunteering what little free time he had between his ER residency and co-owning a restaurant, which didn't make his girlfriend, Susan, too happy, though he could usually talk her into helping Mark, too.

  "A fresh cup of coffee would be nice," Mark said, sliding his cup toward him. "I'm afraid for now there isn't much else you can do. The case is at a standstill."

  Mark glanced at Steve, who was quietly fuming. He understood Steve's reluctance to spend his Hawaii vacation investigating a murder, but his son had gone along with it anyway. But now that they were back home, Mark was surprised by Steve's unusually heated opposition.

  Many years ago, when Steve first became a detective, he hated it when his father got involved in his cases. It embarrassed Steve to have his dad show up uninvited at crime scenes, offering unsolicited advice and looking over his shoulder. But his son had come to appreciate and rely on Mark's help, ignoring the jeers from fellow cops, and his case clearance rate soared. Over time, Mark and Steve developed a smooth and effective investigative rapport that they both enjoyed.

  Or so Mark thought. What had changed?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  For the next week, it was business as usual for Dr. Mark Sloan. He went into Community General Hospital each day, treated his patients, consulted with other physicians on their patients, attended administrative meetings, and ate his lunches in the cafeteria. When he came home, he read through medical journals, did crossword puzzles, watched CNN, and tried each night, without success, to make a different Danny Royal recipe. He became convinced that Danny Royal, among his other as-yet-unknown crimes, purposely left key ingredients out of his recipes.