Misgivings

by Donn Cortez

  Right now, it told him that he was practically standing on the item he was looking for. He looked around, but there was nothing in plain view.

  And then he looked up.

  Suspended in midair, slowly turning in the breeze, was what looked like a small, bright red plastic dinosaur. “Cute,” Horatio murmured.

  “You see something, Caine?” Sackheim’s voice said in his ear.

  “I do, Agent Sackheim. A small item suspended approximately twelve feet off the ground by fishing wire. I’m going to see what I can do to get it down.”

  “What sort of item?”

  “A plastic dinosaur, with something around its neck. And there seems to be something metal projecting from it, as well. Hang on.”

  No stepladder was in sight, but Horatio found an eight-foot length of wood against one wall. He took a multitool out of his pocket and used it to bend a rusty nail embedded near one end of the lumber into a hook. It took only a second after that to reach up and snag the dinosaur.

  He paused for a moment before pulling it down. Horatio used to work on the bomb squad, and he was only too aware that he could well be yanking on a trip wire. However, the fishing line seemed to be attached to the ceiling with transparent tape; it didn’t feed into any hole he could see, and the ceiling itself didn’t appear to have been tampered with. He held his breath and pulled.

  The dinosaur fell to the floor with a clatter.

  He leaned down and picked it up. “All right. I have the item in question. The metal projecting from it appears to be a USB plug, and the object around its neck is a coin of some sort.”

  “A USB plug? What—hold on. Your associate is informing me that it’s probably a flash drive. Apparently it’s some sort of fad to have them embedded in plastic novelties.”

  Horatio grinned. “Thank Mister Delko for me, will you? I’m going to hook this up and see what’s on it.”

  Horatio’s GPS unit was actually an adapted PDA, using Bluetooth technology to connect; it had USB ports as well, and now he used one of them to plug in the dinosaur.

  The flash drive contained a digital video file. Horatio opened it.

  The face that looked out from the screen was that of Abdus Sattar Pathan. He had a thick, bloodstained bandage taped to the side of his neck, and his shirt was bloodied and torn. His hands were behind his back; he looked exhausted and afraid. Behind him was only a black curtain.

  “Lieutenant Caine,” Abdus said. “I am relaying this message at the command of my captors. You will follow all instructions to the letter. No one but you must travel to the locations you will be directed to. The hostage will be punished for any deviations.”

  Horatio studied the man’s eyes. He was clearly reading off something in front of him—from the way he bent his body forward and squinted, ever so slightly, it was probably something small. A computer screen, maybe?

  “You wonder why we have brought you here,” Abdus continued. “It is because we want you to see as we do. Look around you, Mister Caine. Is not this place the epitome of Miami? Filled with promise and hope, but so often prey to decay and corruption. A shining example to all who look upon her, but empty inside.” Abdus spoke in a hollow monotone, his uninflected delivery giving the words an eerie weight. “One man in Miami might look upon the tower and remember its brilliant lighted eye as his first glimpse of a new home and a new life; another man on the same street might recall living where you stand right now, surrounded by filth and squalor and the incoherent raving of the mad, watching as someone commits slow suicide with a crack pipe or a needle.

  “Think about this, Mister Caine. Think about what it means, because it is important.

  “The coin around the neck of the dinosaur is a geocaching coin. Printed on the outside is a code. You must enter this code into the geocaching website to obtain further instructions.”

  The screen went blank.

  “I have the results you wanted,” the lab tech said. “Oh, good,” Wolfe said. “You’re Frankel, right?”

  The man with the folder in his hands hesitated. Confusion bloomed in his large, moist-looking eyes, and he glanced nervously down at his right breast where L. FRANKEL was stitched.

  “Oh, good,” he said nervously. “I thought I’d taken someone else’s lab coat again by accident.”

  “Uh—no, it doesn’t look like it,” Wolfe said. “The results?”

  “Oh, yes.” Frankel thrust the folder at him as if it were about to explode. Wolfe raised his eyebrows and took it.

  He opened it and scanned the first page. “Hmmm.”

  “Interesting sample,” Frankel said. “Don’t see many rare earth elements. Yttrium oxide is commonly used to make europium phosphors—they’re what produce the color red in TV screens. Also, its atomic number is thirty-nine, it’s named after a small town in Sweden and it’s spelled with a y.”

  “I . . . can see that.”

  “Oh. Of course. Good-bye.” Frankel spun on his heel and left.

  “And they say I’m weird . . .” Wolfe muttered.

  “So,” Tripp said. “You figure out what that white powder is?”

  Wolfe looked up from the printout he’d been studying and said, “Hey, Frank. As a matter of fact, the GC/mass-spec just came back. The results were—well, elementary.”

  “Maybe to you, Sherlock. I’m still in the dark, here.”

  “Sorry. I just meant that the powder is an element—well, the compound of an element, anyway. Yttrium oxide.”

  “Don’t think I’m familiar with that one,” Tripp said, crossing his arms.

  “It’s commonly found in rare-earth minerals. And some non-earth ones as well.”

  “Come again?”

  “Samples of lunar rock brought back by the Apollo mission were found to have a high yttrium content.”

  Tripp sighed. “Great. So now we’re looking for a female killer Santa from outer space, is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Not exactly. Commercially, yttrium is extracted from monazite sand and bastanite—you don’t have to go all the way to the moon to get it. And it’s used for—” Wolfe stopped himself. “Well, a wide variety of manufacturing processes.”

  “Huh. I don’t suppose you’ve got some brilliant CSI way to link that to fat guys in red suits, do you?”

  “Not yet . . . but together with the battery acid, it suggests some sort of industrial procedure.”

  “Sure. We’ve stumbled across Santa’s secret workshop, now turning out toys and moon rocks.”

  “Frank, you sound a little stressed.”

  Tripp ran a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt across the smooth scalp on top of his bullet-shaped head. “Sorry, kid. I hate being laughed at, and this case makes me feel like everyone else in the world is in on the joke except me.”

  “I know the feeling. But you were definitely right about one thing.”

  Tripp scowled. “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “CSIs giving answers that sound like encyclopedia entries.”

  Tripp paused, and then a grudging smile worked its way onto his face. “So, I guess I’ve got a firm grip on at least one fact.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Horatio muttered as he stared at the handheld screen of his PDA.

  “Hope you brought your hip waders, H,” a familiar voice said in his ear.

  “Eric?”

  “Yeah. I convinced them to patch me in. Sackheim and his crew are pulling all the data they can get on the next location. They’re trying to backtrack where the postings on the geocache site came from—there’s at least three more—but they’re not having much luck. The messages were bounced all over the net first and heavily encrypted. No way we’re going to be able to crack them.”

  “Then I guess,” Horatio said, slipping on his sunglasses as he headed for the exit, “that I’ll just have to stick to following orders . . . for now. I’m heading for the next destination.”

  “Anything you want me to do in the meantime?”

  Horatio emer
ged into bright sunlight, nodded to the security guard, and headed for his Hummer. “Not just yet. Stick close and keep me apprised of any new developments as they come up.” What Horatio meant—and knew Delko understood—was watch Sackheim and keep him honest. Horatio had no intention of being blindsided while in the field, and he knew Delko wouldn’t let it happen.

  “You got it, H,” Delko said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  Horatio pointed the Hummer south, cutting his way through the traffic on Biscayne Boulevard as quickly and efficiently as he could, and got onto Highway 1 heading out of town.

  “You have any idea where all this is going?” Delko asked.

  “To at least three more locations, if the pattern holds true. But that’s not the troublesome part.”

  “No ransom demand.”

  “Exactly. Which means either they haven’t figured out what they want yet, or this is building to something extremely ugly.”

  “Yeah. I can’t quite figure it out myself—most kidnappers make elaborate plans beforehand, and the geocaching messages definitely indicate forethought. But the initial crime scene and lack of a ransom demand suggest hostage takers stalling for time.”

  “The truth probably lies somewhere in between, Eric. But at least we know Pathan is still alive.”

  “Or was when the recording was made.”

  “I don’t think they’ll kill him just yet. As long as he’s alive, he’s a bargaining chip—and sooner or later, they’re going to tell us what they want.”

  Wolfe stared at the sheet of paper in his hand. “I don’t believe it.”

  Valera shrugged. “What do you want me to say? I checked three times. The samples you gave me didn’t match.”

  “So Monica Steinwitz didn’t have sex with Kingsley Patrick.”

  “That I don’t know. But if they did, I can’t prove it.”

  “Thanks, Valera. I’ll break the news to Frank.”

  Wolfe left the DNA lab, thinking about what the new information meant. If Steinwitz hadn’t slept with Patrick, then the mysterious Amelia Claus must have. Therefore, she’d also sent the emails from the abandoned storefront, where she’d been using yttrium oxide to do—what? Yttrium was sometimes used in the manufacturing of laser components; maybe she was building a death ray . . .

  “I’m starting to think like Frank,” he muttered to himself.

  “Hi, Ryan,” the gray-haired receptionist said with a grin, standing in his way. He stopped, then noticed she was pointing upward.

  At the mistletoe, directly over his head.

  * * *

  Horatio had suspected, from the description on the geocaching site, what the next leg of his journey would entail. Still, it was one thing to suspect; the reality was quite another.

  Alligators. Not one, not a dozen, not twenty or thirty or even fifty. Hundreds, sprawled along a narrow length of white sand, lying alongside and on top of one another, as if they had all lined up to buy tickets for some sort of lizard concert and fallen asleep in the sun. Other than the occasional twitch of an immense tail or wrinkled eyelid, they lay torpid and unmoving in the Florida heat. The large, green-scummed pond beside them held more, some floating motionlessly, others moving slowly through the algae-thick water. They were all close to the same size, around seven or eight feet in length.

  “Impressive sight, isn’t it?” The woman who spoke was dressed in khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, with frizzy brown hair curling out from beneath a white pith helmet that bore the logo GATOR PARADISE. The name stitched over her right breast read BETH.

  Horatio stared through the chain-link fence at the crocodilians basking a few feet away. “It is,” he said, and pulled his PDA out of his pocket.

  “There’s more than thirty alligator farms in Florida now,” Beth continued. “They produce three hundred thousand pounds of meat and over fifteen thousand skins a year. Plus, farms like this that are open to the public generate tourism revenue, too.” A large sign attached to the fence proclaimed PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE ALLIGATORS. Horatio’s attention was caught by a second, smaller sign, a plastic-laminated sheet of paper tacked to the bottom of the first. It featured a photo of a small pile of what looked like corroded bits of round metal. Beneath the photo were these words:

  ALLIGATORS WILL EAT ALMOST ANYTHING. MANY

  PEOPLE LIKE TO TEST THIS BY TOSSING SMALL OBJECTS

  (LIKE COINS) INTO THE PEN. UNFORTUNATELY, THESE COINS

  ACCUMULATE IN THE ALLIGATORS’ STOMACHS AND THEIR

  GASTRIC JUICES PARTIALLY DISSOLVE THEM, RELEASING

  ZINC INTO THE ANIMALS’ SYSTEMS AND PRODUCING

  FATAL ZINC POISONING.

  PLEASE DO NOT THROW COINS INTO THE PEN!

  “I don’t suppose zinc improves the taste any, either,” Horatio said.

  Beth smiled. “You’d be amazed what people will try to get them to eat. An alligator’s digestive system is similar to that of certain kinds of birds; they swallow rocks—they’re called gastroliths once they’re internal—which stay inside and help grind up things like bones and shells. Since crocodilians tend to swallow things whole if they can, more than one live turtle has found himself at the bottom of a gator’s gullet before he could blink.”

  “And some of the things they eat stay inside?”

  “Sure. One gator was found with an eight-inch ball of tightly wrapped roots in its stomach—the cellulose in the roots resisted digestion, and the natural contractions of the gut kept it rotating. It didn’t eat the roots on purpose, though; they were ingested accidentally, probably while it was snapping up small fish or turtles on the bottom.”

  Horatio glanced from his PDA to the gator pen. “How many gators do you have here?”

  “Around a thousand. This pen probably holds a third of that.”

  “So, over three hundred possible repositories . . . if they’re telling the truth.”

  “Uh—what?”

  “Beth, I have a bit of a problem here.” Horatio pulled out his badge. “I have reason to believe that a vital piece of evidence in a crime has been ingested by one of your alligators. According to my information, it’s one of the alligators in this pen.”

  She looked disturbed. “Is it . . . a body? We have security, but one of our nightmares is someone using the gators to get rid of a corpse . . .”

  “Nothing like that. What I’m looking for is much smaller. A coin, in fact.”

  The look on Beth’s face shifted toward skepticism. “Are you sure someone isn’t pulling your leg?”

  “The only thing I’m sure of at this point,” Horatio said, “is that someone doesn’t want this to be easy.”

  * * *

  Alexx strode into the lab like she was looking for a cheating husband. Her glare settled on Calleigh, who was studying blown-up photos pinned to a light panel on the wall.

  “Ms. Duquesne? May I have a word?”

  The edge in Alexx’s voice got Calleigh’s attention. “Something wrong, Alexx?”

  “You could say that. I just got a visit from an extremely distraught Solana Villanova—she wants to go home for Christmas, but she won’t leave until we release the body of her ex-husband. The problem is, nobody seems to know whose case this is—I just talked to Frank Tripp, and he mentioned Ryan Wolfe was working on it now. What gives, Calleigh? Hector’s being kicked around like a football.”

  Calleigh ducked her head. “I’m sorry, Alexx. It’s still my case. Ryan was just doing me a favor—I promise, I haven’t forgotten about Hector Villanova.”

  “Well, I should hope not. Can I release the body?”

  “Yes, that should be fine. Go ahead.”

  “Thank you.” Alexx turned and strode out of the room without saying good-bye.

  Calleigh felt bad, but she didn’t know what else she could say. The deeper she dug into the Villanova case, the more mysteries she found—now she had to explain how a body could have its hands removed with a corrosive in the middle of a swamp without leaving any trace behind.

&nbs
p; A second boat, maybe? One that the body was mutilated in, then was used to ferry the killer out of the swamp?

  It was possible—but why use two boats in the first place?

  To isolate Villanova, perhaps. Prevent any trace of his body being left in the other craft. But that didn’t work, either—why would the killer haul the corpse into the other boat to remove the hands?

  She sighed. The problem was, she didn’t have enough information. When that happened in a case, the fallback position was almost always the same: go back to the crime scene.

  It looked as if she was heading out to alligator country.

  14

  “BETH,” HORATIO SAID, “does the farm have a metal detector on the premises?”

  The young woman nodded. “We’ve got two, actually—it’s one of the ways we check the gators if we think they’ve swallowed something they shouldn’t. We only do it if they’re acting sick, though.”

  Horatio rubbed the back of his neck. “And how many staff do you have working right now?”

  “Uh—six or seven, I think.”

  “Okay. What I need is for your staff to check each and every one of the gators in this pen, and I need it done right away. Is that possible?”

  “To check all of them? That’ll take a while.”

  “A man’s life is at stake, Beth.” He motioned to the walkie-talkie clipped to her belt. “Get in touch with whoever you need to, and let’s get started. All right?”

  “Sure, yeah.” She unclipped the walkie-talkie and spoke into it. “Fred? Got a situation here . . .”

  Horatio turned back to study the pen full of lazing gators as Beth explained things to her supervisor. One of the lizards seemed to be studying him back, its gold-rimmed eye gleaming in the sunlight. The natural curve of its mouth seemed to Horatio like a mocking grin: Wouldn’t you like to know what I had for dinner? Why don’t you climb over the fence and take a closer look?