Misgivings

by Donn Cortez

  Horatio regarded him coolly. “You seem very sure of that. What if the attacker planted your fingerprints the same way you claim he placed the scarf around your neck?”

  Pathan met Horatio’s eyes calmly. “That seems a trifle hard to believe, doesn’t it, Lieutenant? After all, this is a convenience-store robbery we are talking about, not some criminal mastermind.”

  “Actually, the store wasn’t robbed,” Horatio said. “Which seems odd, don’t you think? That our mystery man would go to all the trouble to frame you, but leave the cash behind?”

  Pathan nodded. “Yes, it does. But the workings of another’s mind are always a mystery, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Maybe so,” Horatio said. “Fortunately, I have something much more concrete to rely on; I have evidence, Mister Pathan . . . and believe me, what it has to say won’t be mysterious at all.”

  Pathan’s smile widened, ever so slightly. “Well, then, Lieutenant Caine,” he said softly, “I can only hope the truth will set me free . . .”

  * * *

  “Morning, Wolfe,” Frank Tripp said. He finished off his cup of coffee and motioned toward the waitress for a refill.

  “Morning.” Wolfe yawned and slid into the booth across from the detective. After interviewing Santas late into the night, he had gone home and caught a few hours’ sleep, agreeing to meet Tripp for breakfast to compare notes. They were at Auntie Bellum’s, an old-style art deco diner close to the crime lab. Wolfe stared at a menu and tried to get his eyes to focus.

  “What’s the matter—didn’t get your beauty sleep?” Tripp sounded in a better mood than last night.

  “Mm,” Wolfe said. “I’m fine. Think I dreamt about fat guys in sleighs all night, though.”

  “Yeah? I decided not to take the chance. Haven’t been to bed yet.” The waitress, a pretty young Cuban girl, delivered Tripp’s breakfast with a smile. He smiled back and dug into his eggs with a fork and knife.

  “Just coffee, please,” Wolfe told her. “Maybe I should have stayed up, too. Feel like I’ve got a head full of . . . whatever the opposite of brains is.”

  Tripp dunked a triangle of toast in the yolk of his eggs. “Better get in the game, son. We’ve got a lot to go over.”

  “I know, I know. Man, I must have talked to fifty Santas last night.”

  “Fifty-two. I talked to seventy-three, myself.”

  “Okay. What do we know?”

  Tripp finished chewing and swallowed before answering. “Well, apparently this is an annual thing—they call it Santarchy, or Santacon. Started around ten years ago. Groups get together and go on what they call a rampage—basically, an excuse for an extended bar crawl. They sing naughty Christmas carols, give away mutant toys, indulge in public nudity—”

  “I’m sorry—mutant toys?” Wolfe added cream and sugar to his cup.

  “Yeah. They chop up a bunch of old toys, then glue ’em back together. Teddy bear heads stuck on top of G.I. Joes, that kinda thing.”

  “And this has been going on for a decade? How come I’ve never heard of it?” Wolfe took a sip of his coffee.

  “I said it’s been going on for ten years—I didn’t say in Miami. Started in San Francisco—big surprise—and spread from there. From what I understand, the so-called Red Menace has made appearances in Barcelona, Helsinki, Bangkok, New York, London, Vancouver, Tokyo—even the Antarctic. They’ve only started up in our neck of the woods recently.”

  Wolfe stared at Tripp blearily over the rim of his coffee cup. “That’s . . . impressive, Frank. So I guess you’ll be handling the information on this case and I’ll be arresting the bad guys?”

  Tripp chuckled. “What, you think only you CSI guys know how to do research? In case you didn’t notice, my badge does say detective.”

  “Okay—point noted. So what else can you tell me about our jolly gang of suspects?”

  “Let’s see . . . well, despite all the drunken tomfoolery, they’ve actually got a pretty strict code of conduct.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. They call it the four effs. As in, don’t eff with the cops, don’t eff with store security, and don’t eff with the kids.”

  “Yeah? What’s the fourth eff?”

  “Don’t eff with Santa. Guess somebody decided to break that one.”

  “And now they’re effing with us,” Wolfe said.

  “Not all of them. Actually, they’re a fairly reasonable bunch, once they understand you’re not out to ruin their good time.”

  Wolfe frowned. “Did you and I talk to the same group last night, or were you interviewing a different bunch of drunk Santas?”

  Tripp took a swig from his glass of OJ. “Well, there’s drunk, and then there’s drunk. You may have encountered a few more of the second kind than I did—one of the uniforms that rode herd on the crowd is an old friend of mine.”

  Wolfe nodded his head ruefully. “Gotcha. So you accumulated useful information, and I accumulated vomit. Terrific.”

  “Well,” Tripp said, polishing off his last piece of toast, “not everybody’s a people person.”

  “Okay, so now we know what all the Santas were doing there. How about our vic?”

  Tripp wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and leaned back. “Not a lot to go on. None of the other Santas seemed to know him, though by all accounts he was enjoying himself. He spent most of his time flirting with the female Santas.”

  “Any of them admit to more than flirting?”

  “Sure. He played a little tonsil hockey with a few of them and was more than happy to spank the naughty ones. That’s another thing that’s big with Santas—spanking.”

  “That I could have told you,” Wolfe said. “I had one show me her paddle. She was very proud of it.”

  “Nobody would admit to jumping our vic’s bones. Nobody caught his real name, either, but that’s no surprise—during the rampage, everyone refers to everyone else as Santa. There are individual variations—Spanky Claus, Santa Ho—but those are generally used between friends. Our vic apparently went by the name Santa Shaky.”

  “He get into trouble with any of the other Santas?”

  “If he did, nobody’s talking.”

  Wolfe signaled the waitress for more coffee. “Well, hopefully we’ll know more once we figure out who this guy is. Could be his death had nothing to do with the other Santas.”

  Tripp nodded. “Might not even be a homicide. Guy could have just stroked out—maybe even in midstroke.”

  “And his partner either didn’t notice or freaked out and ran away,” Wolfe said. “Either way—not very nice.”

  “How’s it going on the forensic front?”

  Wolfe stirred his coffee and suppressed another yawn. “Well, I’ll be heading straight to the lab after this—I’ve got a lot of material to go through. Fiber samples, beard samples, boot casts, plus I found evidence of sexual activity so I’ve got to talk to Valera about DNA. And we won’t have a cause of death until Alexx performs the autopsy.”

  “I’m gonna take a closer look at our list of suspects, run ’em for priors, see if any of ’em stands out.” Tripp stood up, pulled out his wallet, and tossed a few bills on the table. “Coffee’s on me. I’ll see you later, all right?”

  “Sure.” I’ll be the one, Wolfe thought as Tripp strode out the door, draped over the microscope, asleep.

  Chester Cypress used an airboat to ferry Delko to the spot where the Miccosukee had found the body. “I guess I could have left it where I found it,” he told the CSI, speaking loudly to be heard above the racket of the boat’s prop, “but what if a gator stole it before I got back? I’d look like I was making up stories.”

  “You sure you can find the exact same spot?” Delko asked.

  Chester Cypress just nodded. Delko supposed he’d have to trust him.

  The channel they’d been following through the saw grass led into the undergrowth, the knobby knees of cypress roots jutting up like the black legs of giant, half-submerged crabs. It was c
ooler in the shade, but the temperature was still in the high seventies and climbing.

  Even in the bright sunshine of midmorning, the swamp felt haunted. Spanish moss hung from the dead branches of trees like decaying lace shawls draped over bone, as they moved slowly through thick, silty black water that gave no hint to its depth. The racket of the airboat’s fan obscured all natural sounds, providing a kind of surreal white noise that buried insect chatter and birdsong. Brilliant shafts of sunlight would occasionally break through the overhead canopy, dazzling the eyes and deepening the surrounding shadows.

  Eventually, Chester Cypress killed the engine. After the roar of the prop, the silence seemed overpowering.

  The boat bumped against a dead log jutting from the bank. “See that mark, right there?” Chester pointed to a cut emblazoned on the log. “That’s where I found him, floating right next to that log.”

  Delko nodded. “Okay. I just want to take a look around, see if there’s anything obvious. If not, I’ll have to dive.”

  “Ah. You want me to do anything?”

  “You have a rifle, right?”

  Chester nodded.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep an eye out for gators while I’m in the water,” Delko said. “My superiors tend to get a little upset when one of us gets eaten.”

  Chester shrugged. “I can do that. Seems kinda strange, though. Shouldn’t you have a partner watching your back?”

  “What can I say—it’s the holidays. Everybody’s busy. And no offense, but riding shotgun on a swamp boat isn’t that high on anyone’s list of priorities.”

  Delko looked around, trying to envision what had happened. Was it a body dump, or had the John Doe died here? If the vic had been taken out here in a boat, there was no way to backtrack it . . .

  Delko unpacked his camera gear, then clambered out of the boat and onto the shore. He bent down and examined the surface of the log. A muddy footprint was barely visible on the mossy surface; he took a picture of it.

  “You didn’t get out of the boat when you retrieved the body, did you?” he asked Chester.

  “Nope.”

  Okay, so someone—maybe the vic, maybe someone else, stood here. Let’s assume it was John Doe, and he’s got some kind of explosive around his neck or stuffed into his mouth. The bomb goes off, the body falls in the water.

  He checked tree trunks at head-height, looking for blast damage. Nothing obvious, but the closest tree was a good fifteen feet away; a small charge might not have left any visible charring.

  Shrapnel, though, was another matter . . .

  He started a closer examination of all the trunks in the immediate vicinity, working outward in a spiraling radius. Anything that had gone into the water, the mud, or the undergrowth was probably gone forever, but the solid wood of a living tree was a much better medium.

  He found what he was looking for around six feet off the ground in the bole of a mangrove tree. He took a few pictures, then pried it out carefully with a small knife.

  “Whatcha find?” Chester called out. “Bullet?”

  Delko put his discovery into an evidence envelope. “Not sure. Might be an incisor, might be a molar.”

  “A tooth? For real?”

  “Unless the guy wore dentures, yeah,” Delko said, grinning.

  “Wow. How’d you know it was up there?”

  “Sorry, I can’t really discuss details of the case. I probably shouldn’t have told you that much.” Still, he thought, I’m about to trust the guy with keeping me safe from large carnivorous reptiles. Better not to tick him off. “Let’s just say I used deductive reasoning and a knowledge of blast mechanics, all right?”

  “Yeah? Wow,” Chester said again. He sounded impressed.

  So the vic had his head blown off here. And his hands, too? Alexx said she thought his arms had chemical burns on them, but was that done pre- or postmortem? Was it a result of the explosion, or something different?

  He peered down at the water and sighed. It was going to be next to impossible to see anything down there, but he had to try.

  “All right, I’m going to suit up,” he told Chester.

  A few minutes later he slid into the water. Chester had poled its depth to around ten feet, but the amount of debris and algae in the water blocked a great deal of the light. What filtered through was green and murky; by the time he was on the bottom, he felt as if he were a hundred feet from the surface.

  Shadows and silt swirled around him like a living particulate cloud. The bottom was littered with dead logs and rocks; he picked his way through carefully, shining his wrist-mounted light into every hollow and crevice.

  He came upon the boat around twenty feet from the bank. It was a battered aluminum skiff, with a jagged hole in its bottom and charring around the edges. Delko could tell it hadn’t been there long.

  The boat itself held nothing except a long pole wedged under one seat and a few rocks that looked as if they’d been placed there for weight.

  Maybe the bomb that destroyed John Doe’s head also sank the boat. So it might not be a murder—it could be an accident.

  Delko didn’t know. What he did know was that he’d have to get the sunken skiff back to the lab and take a closer look at it. Hope Chester doesn’t mind helping me haul this up; not really his job, after all.

  But then, guarding a CSI wasn’t, either, and so far he hadn’t seemed to mind that. Chester Cypress was at home in the swamp, but Delko was showing him things he hadn’t seen before; no matter how much you thought you knew, a CSI could always reveal something you didn’t . . .

  4

  THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF EVIDENCE against Abdus Sattar Pathan, Calleigh knew, would be the fingerprint he’d left on the magazine. By waving it around in front of the security camera, Pathan had provided visual evidence he’d handled it just before the assault; once she had his fingerprint from the magazine itself, Pathan wouldn’t be able to claim he was being framed by some unknown criminal.

  There were a number of techniques for lifting prints. Often, the method employed was dictated by the surface the print was on. For high-gloss paper like that of the magazine, Calleigh knew just what was called for.

  The device she selected resembled a slim Maglite flashlight, made of black anodized aluminum. A short cylinder projected from the flared end, like an oversize metal bulb; it held a powerful rare-earth magnet inside. A small, inverted cone projected from the opposite end of the device.

  She poured a small amount of Magneta Flake, an iron powder coated with amino acids, onto a piece of paper, then stuck the cylinder end of the applicator into it. Immediately, a spiky head of particles formed around the cylinder. She lifted it off the paper, then carefully dusted the print with it, barely grazing the surface with the fuzzy metallic brush she’d created. When she was done, she held the applicator over the small pile of powder she’d first drawn from and pulled the cone-shaped handle on the butt end. The spring-loaded internal magnet moved away from the tip, causing the powder to drop from the cylinder.

  She got a gel-lifter from the lab’s fridge—gel was better for materials like printed paper, where a stronger adhesive might lift ink as well as the print, but it needed to be kept refrigerated. Once she’d lifted the print, she used the lab’s scanner to enter it into the system.

  And suddenly, her day got a lot worse.

  “H,” Calleigh said, “you are not going to believe this.”

  Horatio glanced at his CSI and raised his eyebrows. “Oh? What’s going on?”

  He and Calleigh were in the main lab, looking at the fingerprint data from the Pathan case. Calleigh had the information up on one of the big flat-screen monitors.

  “Okay, I dusted the magazine from the convenience store for prints. I ran the security video again, and you can clearly see Pathan’s right thumb pressed against the page. The magazine is open at that point, and the image is fairly clear.”

  “Not to mention revealing,” Horatio said.

  “Yes, the y
oung lady in question doesn’t seem to have a problem with shyness. Her turn-offs include narrow-minded people, polyester, and men who chew with their mouths open. I doubt if any of those things inspired the attack, though.”

  “And the problem is?”

  “The problem is that I matched the image onscreen to page one seventy-three of the magazine and found a nice big thumbprint right where it should be. No other prints on the page.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s not Pathan’s.”

  Horatio frowned. “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I picked up the wrong magazine from the scene.”

  “No. There was only one magazine on the floor, and it was the same one we saw in the video.”

  “Could the magazine have been switched after the fight? It wasn’t in the frame of the camera while it was on the floor.”

  Horatio rubbed his jaw with one hand, thinking. “So while Pathan is lying there unconscious, someone else sneaks in and replaces a key piece of evidence? That makes even less sense.”

  “Maybe Pathan is telling the truth. The man in the video is someone else.”

  “That’s certainly what his lawyer is going to claim . . . and right now, we can’t prove otherwise.” Horatio shook his head. “Something about this is very wrong. Our suspect refuses to have his fingerprints taken, then has an abrupt change of heart at the same time a fingerprint clears him of the crime?”

  “Yeah. It stinks, doesn’t it . . .”

  “Yes, it does. Tell you what—let’s take a look at the other evidence, shall we? The scarf, for instance. Maybe it can tell us something.”

  “All right—but if he’s claiming the scarf was planted, then linking it to him won’t necessarily do us much good.”

  Horatio narrowed his eyes. “You let me worry about that . . .”

  “He recovered consciousness a few hours after he was brought in,” the nurse behind the station said. She was Asian, with a broad, friendly face and rectangular, gold-rimmed glasses. “Broken nose, bruised windpipe, mild concussion. Some internal swelling of the brain tissue, but no bleeding. Skull is still in one piece, no stitches. We’re keeping him a few more hours for observation, then he can go home.”