Misgivings

by Donn Cortez

  “I wouldn’t take it personally, if I were you,” Tripp said.

  “And as for cause of death, we haven’t determined that yet,” Wolfe said. “So no one else knew you and he were outside together?”

  “I guess someone could have seen us leave. I’m pretty sure nobody saw me come back in, though.”

  Wolfe and Tripp glanced at each other, and Tripp shrugged.

  “Okay, that about wraps it up for now,” Wolfe said. “We’ll be in touch once the autopsy’s finished and the lab results have come back.” He hesitated. “Just one thing, though. Why Santa?”

  She gave him a wary look. “You mean, why did I . . .”

  “Get jolly?” Tripp offered.

  “No, no,” Wolfe said. “I mean, the whole Santarchy thing. Why do you do it? Is it just an excuse to put on a costume and get drunk?”

  She studied him for a second, then decided he was genuinely interested. “That’s not it. Well, some of it, sure, but not all. The real reason is simple: everyone loves Santa . . .”

  “You would know,” Tripp said under his breath.

  “But what about the kids?” Wolfe said. “I mean, doesn’t it bother you that you’re portraying Santa as a drunken pack of party animals?”

  She sighed. “First of all, we don’t mess around with kids. Any of the mutant toys we give to children are kid-friendly. Second, we only get really crazy late at night or in bars, where there shouldn’t be any kids, anyway. And third—how old were you when you found out Santa wasn’t real?”

  The question caught Wolfe off guard. “I don’t know—seven or eight, I guess.”

  “You remember how you felt?”

  “Actually, I do. At first I was angry and wouldn’t believe it, and then I was really sad.”

  “That’s how a lot of people remember it. See, we have all these little myths about Santa we tell our kids, all these rituals—putting out stockings, leaving milk and cookies, making a list—and all of it is really designed for just one thing: to convince us he’s real. But he isn’t. And there’s no corresponding ritual to let us know that, no ritual to let us know that Mommy and Daddy have been fibbing to us our whole lives. Don’t you think that’s kind of screwed up?”

  Wolfe frowned. “I never really thought about it like that before.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not saying that’s the purpose of Santacon. I’m just saying that as far as sacred cows go, a fat guy in a red suit that symbolizes spending lots of money while lying to your kids isn’t an icon I think deserves a lot of respect. Of course, a lot of pagans would disagree with me—but that’s a whole ’nother rant, and I just want to go home and go to bed. Okay?”

  “You’re free to go,” Tripp said. “Merry Christmas.”

  She stood up and gave him a weak but genuine smile. “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

  Natalia Boa Vista was lead scientist for the Justice Project, a federally funded program designed to reexamine cold cases in the light of DNA evidence and new technology. The project was headquartered out of the Miami-Dade Crime Lab, and government money had paid for refurbishing much of the building as the scope of its responsibilities expanded. That made Natalia both popular and unpopular; while most of the lab’s workers appreciated the new facilities and equipment, the DNA lab was now a much bigger player in the internal politics that went, inevitably, with any bureaucracy. Natalia was, by nature, outgoing and friendly, but she was passionately dedicated to her cause and wouldn’t back down from a fight. She’d already ticked off several people in the power structure, which usually caused Horatio to give her an amused nod when he passed her in the hall. She got the sense he enjoyed how she was stirring things up.

  One person she didn’t have a lot of experience with, though, was Alexx Woods. Alexx dealt almost exclusively with the recently deceased, while Natalia’s purview was cold cases. So she was somewhat surprised when Alexx came over and sat down across from her in the break room.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Sure,” Natalia said with a smile. “What’s up?”

  “Well, I’m not sure if you can help or not. I’m having trouble identifying a body—no fingerprints, no hits through CODIS. You’re specialty is cases everyone else has given up on—I was hoping you might have some advice.”

  Natalia took a sip of her bottled water and thought about it. “Well, I generally use standard DNA techniques to examine old evidence. I do have access to more and more databases every day, though; I could reach out to some agencies that are just coming online, including some international ones. If your vic is from another country, we might get lucky.”

  “Well, skin tone suggests he might be Hispanic, but that’s hardly definitive. He might be Native American, Asian, or even an Eskimo for all I know.”

  “Well, there are certain genetic markers associated with indigenous people from the Americas. If the Q3 haplogroup shows up, we can at least narrow down where he’s from, genetically speaking.”

  “Well, that would help. Thank you.” Alexx shook her head. “I don’t know. More than likely, this guy was just on the bad end of a drug deal and wound up in the swamp—but for some reason, it’s bothering me more than usual.”

  “Maybe it’s because he’s a blank slate,” Natalia suggested. “When you don’t know anything about a person, you tend to project characteristics onto them. It’s like when you’re walking along and you see the back of someone’s head; you form a picture in your mind of what their face looks like, even though you really don’t have enough information to do so.”

  “Maybe. You can’t get much blanker than this poor guy; he doesn’t even have a face, let alone a name.”

  “You really get attached to them, don’t you?” Natalia said curiously.

  “They’re my patients. I feel the same responsibility to them as I would to someone living.”

  “I get that,” Natalia said. “It’s how I feel about my cases, too. Nobody deserves to be forgotten.”

  “No. They don’t. But at least your subjects get a second chance; by the time mine reach me, all their chances have been used up.”

  “Yeah. One of the guys I just helped to free referred to me as the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

  “What?” Alexx looked startled.

  “You know, Scrooge? Revisiting your own history, getting a second chance?”

  “Sure, I know, it’s just—I was just thinking about that earlier.”

  “Well, ’tis the season, right?”

  Alexx got up from the table. “For some of us, anyway. Thanks, Natalia. Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, Alexx. I’ll run that DNA as soon as I can.”

  6

  CRUISE SHIPS WERE ALWAYS HUNGRY for entertainment. Most ships had more than one lounge or theater, and while the bigger rooms often featured musical reviews and floor shows, the smaller ones favored comedians, singers—and magicians.

  “The Brilliant Batin,” as Abdus Sattar Pathan billed himself, had carved something of a niche for himself in this particular world. As Horatio discovered, many cruise ship talent bookers knew his name, and almost all of them recommended him highly.

  Almost.

  “Well, he’s very talented, there’s no doubt about that,” one booker told Horatio over the phone. “His close-up stuff is phenomenal, his patter is smooth, he’s young and good-looking and extremely dedicated to his craft.”

  Years of experience had taught Horatio to hear a certain unspoken word in another’s speech; he added the qualifier himself out of sheer reflex. “But?”

  “But . . . there’s something a little off-putting about him. One of the unwritten rules of magic is never scare the audience. You might think that’s strange, what with escape artists risking death and women getting sawed in half, but all of that stuff is designed to thrill, not scare.”

  “I’m not sure I understand the difference.”

  “When you’re thrilled, you have a sense of adventure, that you’re plunging into the unknown, that any
thing’s possible. But it’s like a roller coaster—you feel like it’s dangerous, even though you know that it’s not. Ultimately, you have to trust the magician—he’s like the track the roller coaster’s on. Batin . . . well, sometimes you get the impression his track’s a little shaky.”

  “Are you saying he’s unstable?”

  “No, no, that’s not it. . . . Look, it’s hard to explain. It’s just that—sometimes I get the impression he wants to scare people. Really shake them up. It’s almost like he has this personal antagonism toward his audience.”

  “I see. . . . Have you ever seen him behave in a violent manner?”

  “Oh, no, no. Never. The man’s a consummate professional, I’ll give him that. It’s just . . . well, it’s like he’s always on. His stage persona, his offstage persona, they’re the same thing. Very polite, very professional, very calm. There’s this thing about really good magicians when they’re working, they have this sort of focused intensity. Like they’re aware of every detail around them. He projects that, all the time—if anything, he’s too stable, you know? A real control freak.”

  Horatio nodded. “Intensity and control. I think I understand . . .”

  After he hung up, Horatio sat at his desk for a while and thought. It was possible to fake fingerprints, but every case he was familiar with had to do with either planting the fakes at a scene or using them to fool biometric ID devices.

  The procedure wasn’t even that difficult. You started by lifting a print from a surface—preferably glass or glossy paper—using standard graphite powder or fuming it with superglue. You then photographed it with a digital camera and used a laser printer to print it onto the kind of transparency slide used for overhead projectors. The toner formed a relief image, which would then be coated with a mixture of wood glue and glycerin. Once that dried, it could be peeled off and attached to actual fingertips with theatrical glue.

  The thing was, there was a world of difference between fooling a machine and fooling a human being. Horatio had talked to the booking officer who finally took Pathan’s prints, a cop named Elliot Chan, and he swore there was nothing unusual about them; there was just no way Pathan could have slipped a false set of prints past the hands-on process of having his fingers pressed into ink and then rolled onto paper by an experienced officer.

  Not unless he was very, very good.

  Horatio was in the lab with the fingerprint card in front of him. He had examined it minutely under high magnification, looking for any telltale discrepancies around the edges of the prints. He had also run a sample through the mass spec/gas chromatograph, in the hopes of turning up traces of glycerin or an adhesive.

  So far, he’d had absolutely no luck. If the prints were fake, they were perfect, completely indistinguishable from the real thing. Horatio found that hard to believe; what made more sense was simply that he was looking at the wrong piece of evidence.

  He went back to the print lifted from the magazine. It pained him to do so, because Calleigh was the one who’d done the work in the first place, and she was never less than scrupulously accurate. Still, if the prints from the booking weren’t faked, the one from the magazine must have been.

  He ran the same tests all over again—and got exactly the same results.

  Both prints were real.

  Alexx found Delko in the lab, going over explosives data. “Eric? I just received the report on the stomach contents of John Doe.”

  He looked up. “Yeah? Anything interesting?”

  “Sad, more like. Roast turkey, rice, smoked oysters, apricots, cashews, banana, kale, pumpkin seeds, manioc, prunes, bacon, sausage—”

  “That’s quite a meal—”

  “—olives, hard-boiled egg, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and chili peppers.”

  Delko took the report from her outstretched hand and studied it. “Okay, a real feast. A little hard on the digestion, maybe, but why sad?”

  “Don’t you get it, Eric? This was a Christmas dinner, his very last one. Wherever he ate it, he was probably surrounded by people who loved him. And from where we found the food in the digestive system, he probably ate only a few hours before he died.”

  “Well, that could help us identify him. You know, some of those items sound familiar, too . . . can you send me the stomach contents? I’d like to run a few additional tests.”

  “Sure. You think you know where he ate?”

  “Not yet—but I may be able to figure out who cooked the meal . . .”

  “How’s the big Santa hunt going?” Calleigh asked Wolfe when he returned to the lab.

  He pulled on his lab coat before answering. “Well, Reindeer Girl admitted getting her stocking stuffed, but says Santa was still alive when she left.”

  “You believe her?”

  “I don’t know. It’s consistent with what we found, but I still don’t have a COD. Waiting on Alexx for the post.”

  “Well, here’s a little something to consider while you’re waiting. I identified that fiber you couldn’t match.”

  “Really?” Wolfe came over to where Calleigh was perched on a stool beside the comparison microscope.

  “Take a look for yourself.”

  He peered into the eyepiece. “Yeah, that’s a match . . . what is it?”

  “It’s a polypropylene blend. Specifically, the kind used to make indoor/outdoor carpeting.”

  “Wait a minute. I found that fiber trapped in the vic’s pubic hair—but there wasn’t any indoor-outdoor carpeting in the area the body was found.”

  “Which suggests,” Calleigh said, “that Santa got naughty in a different location.”

  “Well, witnesses did say he was doing a lot of flirting. And I haven’t checked with Valera yet about the DNA from the sexual traces I recovered. Hang on a second.”

  Wolfe pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number. “Valera? It’s Wolfe. Just wondering about the Santa case. . . . You did? Great. Uh-huh. Really. Okay, I’ll be over to pick up the results in a few. Bye.”

  “You know,” Calleigh said thoughtfully, “with the open design of the new lab, all the glass louvers and everything? I could actually watch Maxine answer the phone and talk to you.”

  “So?”

  “So you could have just walked over there in the time it took to dial the phone.”

  Wolfe shrugged. “I heard one of the receptionists is running wild with a piece of mistletoe. I’m not going out there if I can help it. . . . Anyway, Valera told me she found DNA from two women in the sample I gave her. One matched Valerie Blitzen.”

  “Ah. So who was the other one—and where?”

  “I don’t know, but I think I know how we can find out. Valerie Blitzen said that the Santas always plan a food stop on their route.”

  Calleigh nodded. “And a route can be retraced.”

  “Exactly. Where they ate might even be the source of that fiber.” He paused. “Wait. That sounds like a commercial for oat bran.”

  “Is that an improvement over Santa puns?”

  “Anything’s an improvement over Santa puns.”

  Delko had once dated a woman from Rio de Janeiro, and she had invited him over to her parents’ house for a traditional Brazilian Easter feast. The main course had been a roast turkey, marinated in lime juice and cachaca rum and stuffed with a dense mix of fruits, nuts, meats, and rice. One of the side dishes had been kale, and another had been rice mixed with pumpkin seeds.

  “We call turkey el ave de los ricos,” she’d told him. “The bird of the rich.”

  “Well, this is certainly rich,” he’d admitted.

  Not to mention hot. He’d had a great time that evening, particularly enjoying the food, and had gone so far as to do some research on the dishes afterward. It was difficult to obtain the peppers used outside of Brazil, but you could order them online— and he had. He’d retrieved some of his supply from home, and now he presented one to Maxine Valera.

  “This is a pepper,” Valera said.

  “Very perceptive,” Del
ko replied. “Specifically, it’s a malagueta pepper, from Brazil. Very hot, too.”

  “How hot?”

  “Thirty to fifty thousand on the Scoville scale. Don’t touch your eyes after handling it.”

  “Thanks for the tip. If you already know what it is, why do you need me?”

  “To see if any of these samples match its DNA.” He presented her with three vials. “From a vic’s stomach. The contents were pretty degraded, but I’m pretty sure one of these little red bits is from a pepper, too.”

  Valera took the vials. “Don’t tell me this is what killed him.”

  Delko grinned. “They’re not that hot, Maxine.”

  He followed up by running down a few Brazilian recipes. Sure enough, he found a stuffing recipe that listed almost all the foods found in John Doe’s stomach.

  He checked the yellow pages. Around twenty Brazilian restaurants were listed in Miami-Dade County, and John Doe could have eaten at any of them . . . or at none. But if his last meal had been at a large family dinner, surely somebody would have filed a missing person’s report by now, and nobody who had disappeared in the last week fit John Doe’s description—what there was of it, anyway.

  Assume he ate at a restaurant. A big meal like this is usually a family feast—not that many places are going to be serving it, even over the holidays. Only some of the larger, upscale places.

  He made some phone calls. A few of the restaurants offered a big roast turkey meal over the holidays, but only served it on Christmas Eve itself—the traditional time in Brazilian culture. None of them had it on their menu a week ago, and Delko was starting to think he’d hit a dead end when one of the places called him back.

  “Miami-Dade Crime Lab, CSI Delko speaking.”

  “Yes, hello. My name is Maria Arrisca. I understand you called asking about our ceia de natal?” The woman’s voice was warm, with a hint of a Portuguese accent.

  “That’s right. You’re calling from which restaurant?”

  “Apimentado’s. You talked to one of my waitresses.”

  “Yes. She told me you don’t put it on the menu until Christmas Eve.”