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Misgivings

Page 18

by Donn Cortez


  “Alligator pie, alligator pie,” Horatio muttered. “If I don’t get some . . . I think I’m going to die . . .”

  “So,” Caldwell, the clean-cut young FBI agent, said, “Miami-Dade Crime Lab, huh? Nice new digs you’ve got.”

  Delko leaned back and cracked his neck. “It’s okay, I guess. Lot of glass, lot of grillwork. Can’t decide if it makes me feel more like I’m in an aquarium or a jail cell.”

  Caldwell laughed. “Yeah. Well, I’m sure it beats Quantico. The amount of light that place gets, it’s like working in a coal mine.”

  “Yeah? You there a lot?”

  Caldwell got up from his seat, walked over to where the butler had set up a coffee service. “Not really. I just transferred over to the Miami office, was in Nebraska before that. Let me tell you, competition for the Miami office is fierce.”

  Delko grinned. “Well, living in this city does have its benefits.”

  “I’ll bet. Don’t get to experience a lot of them on my salary, though. And my free time? You’d have to use a microscope to find it. A scanning electron microscope.”

  “They work you pretty hard, huh?”

  Caldwell poured himself some coffee, then held the china cup under his nose and inhaled deeply. “Ahhh . . . you know what it’s like. A tough case, you work it till it breaks. When there’s no case, you do paperwork.”

  “But there’s always a case.”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s always a case.” Caldwell took a long, slow sip of coffee. “Damn, that’s good. I drank so much bad coffee in Nebraska I think I’m still getting the taste out of my mouth.”

  “Lot of stakeout work?”

  “I’ve done my share. You?”

  Delko shook his head. “Nah. I went from the police academy to the underwater body recovery team. Not a lot of submarine stakeouts.”

  “I’ve seen a few floaters. Don’t envy the guy whose job it is to collect them.”

  Delko got up, walked over, and helped himself to some coffee as well. “Well, I still do underwater recoveries, but as a CSI I get to cover a lot more territory. It’s never boring, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “That why you switched?”

  “Partly. Mainly, it was Horatio.”

  Caldwell took another sip of coffee. “How so?”

  Delko shrugged. “He’s the best cop I know. Some guys get into police work for all the wrong reasons—they want the power, the respect. You know the type. Other guys come in with stars in their eyes, think they’re going to change the world; a few years on the job and they’re as bitter as—well, as the coffee they’re always bitching about. No offense.”

  Caldwell grinned. “None taken.”

  “Anyway, Horatio doesn’t fall into either of those camps. He cares about people, but he manages to be an idealist and a realist at the same time. He cares less about punishing bad guys than protecting people from them.”

  “Well, that’s what it’s all about, right?” Caldwell said. “Making the world a little safer. That’s why I signed up, anyway.”

  “How’s Sackheim to work for?” Delko said, blowing on his coffee.

  “About what you’d expect. By the book, all the way. Stubborn as all hell.”

  “No wonder he and Horatio butt heads. He’s the most stubborn guy I know,” Delko said. “Once he gets his teeth into something, forget it. He’s like a pit bull.”

  “Great. A pit bull and a bureaucrat, with us in the middle,” Caldwell sighed. “Do me a favor, will you? If they start actually growling at each other, just shoot me. Between the eyes.”

  “Sure.” Delko laughed.

  * * *

  They wrangled 152 gators before they got lucky.

  Each gator had to be isolated, held down, and checked with a wand-style metal detector, the kind favored by airport security. Even with two teams working at once, it was a long and exhausting ordeal. Horatio knew he could make it go much quicker by calling in more manpower—but the kidnappers’ instructions had expressly forbidden that.

  It was full dark now, and they’d dragged out halogen lights on poles to provide illumination. A cold, patchy fog was drifting off the water, chilling Horatio to the bone, and the last thing he’d had to eat was a greasy hot dog from the concession stand hours ago.

  “Lieutenant Caine?” a voice called out. “I think we’ve got something.”

  “Hang on, Eric,” Horatio said into his transceiver. He walked over to the smaller, chain-link-enclosed stall abutting the main pen, where the alligators were being corralled and scanned. “What is it?”

  Beth mopped sweat from her forehead with the back of a mud-spattered glove. “Wand’s definitely getting a squeal. Could be what you’re looking for.”

  “All right,” Horatio said, putting his hands on his hips. “What’s next?”

  “We flush.” Beth pointed to a long board with holes running down its sides leaning against the wall of the stall. “Strap him to that, make sure his head is lower than his tail, stick a PVC pipe in his mouth and a bucket below it. Soon as he bites down, we tape his jaws shut around the pipe and slide a smaller, flexible hose through the pipe and down its throat. We pump a little water in, enough so we can see the stomach swell, then push on either side of his belly. Whatever’s inside comes out.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “We flush him again. If it doesn’t come out after a third flush, we’ll have to open him up. Trank him with an intramuscular shot of medetomidineketamine—and then wait for him to conk out.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “At least an hour, but it varies with the animal’s physiology and size—it can take as long as four.”

  “Then let’s hope we don’t have to go that far.” Sifting through lizard vomit, Horatio thought, is far enough . . .

  The process worked exactly as Beth said it would. On the second flush, Horatio spotted a copper flash among the half-digested fish and water gushing into the plastic bucket.

  He reached into the bucket with a latex-gloved hand and plucked it out. It was a metal geocoin, stamped with a distinctive logo: a hammer and sickle. On the other side was a string of numbers and letters.

  “Isn’t that a Russian symbol?” Beth said, peering over Horatio’s shoulder.

  “Yes, it is,” Horatio said. “Beth, thank you for your help. I know how disruptive this has been.”

  “Kind of exciting, actually. Nice break from the routine, anyway. Though I’m glad we didn’t have to process all three hundred and fifty.”

  “I imagine they appreciate it as well,” Horatio said with a smile. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a message waiting . . .”

  Hello, Mister Caine. Congratulations on finding the coin— we really weren’t sure you would. How many animals did you have to kill?

  Not that it matters, of course—not to you. Life is just a resource to be used up, isn’t it? For meat or clothing or slave labor, it makes no difference. We’re sure that standing knee-deep in the blood and guts of slaughtered animals will cause you no more guilt than ordering a steak in your favorite restaurant.

  And for what? To save the life of one man, simply because his father is wealthy? Would you go to such extremes for someone without money, without connections?

  We know what you would say if we were to ask you face-to-face. And it would be a lie.

  Did you see any children at the alligator farm today? Were they excited to see the big, scaly beasts, did they hold a young hatchling in their hands like a pet? Did you tell them that every creature within their sight would be murdered for profit?

  No. You fed them lies, tousled their cute hair, let them pretend that this was a zoo. This is a country, a culture, of falsehoods. We reward the best liars by making them our leaders. And those that don’t lie? What happens to them, Mister Caine?

  This is the question you should be asking. This is the truth you should be seeking.

  But that’s not what you want at the moment. You want the next piece of the jigsaw puzzl
e, the next line of the sonnet. What a sad being you are, Mister Caine; you see only little bits of truth at a time, scraps and fragments of reality, and think this grants you some sort of understanding. It does not.

  We understand the truth. And before we are done, you will as well.

  We have shown you a promise corrupted, and we have shown you the truth behind a lie. Now you must seek innocence beneath sin, to find a coin of another realm. When you have done this, you will understand what we want.

  A list of GPS coordinates followed.

  “You got that, Eric?” Horatio said. He’d unlocked the message with the code on the coin and had just read it on his PDA; he knew the FBI was doing the same back at Khasib Pathan’s mansion.

  “Yeah,” Delko said. “Those coordinates are in South Beach, right on Collins—as a matter of fact, they’re in the middle of a club called Afterpartylife. Very popular with the elite—the guest list is more exclusive than the president’s phone number.”

  “They’ll let me in,” Horatio said. “Just what I need after a long day wrangling alligators—a little time with the beautiful people.”

  “You okay, H? You sound exhausted.”

  “I’m fine, Eric. Look, I need you to look something up for me while I’m in transit.”

  “Sure. What do you need?”

  “See if Abdus Sattar Pathan has ever performed at the Freedom Tower, the alligator farm, or the place I’m heading.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “And I,” Horatio said, “am off to do some clubbing.”

  Afterpartylife was, even by Miami standards, excessive.

  It was layered like a cake, three stories deep. The middle layer was a pool ringed by white sand and illuminated with UV light; the water itself glowed an electric blue. The pool’s walls were transparent, and the pool itself provided much of the light for the layer underneath it, which was done up to resemble a cave. Crystalline stalactites grew from the ceiling, hanging over plush red leather couches and glowing softly with their own crimson light.

  The topmost layer had a dance floor made of glass—or some ultrastrong transparent resin—letting those in the pool look up at the people dancing overhead. Smoke generators puffed out bursts of white mist, generating artificial clouds for the patrons to dance on. The decor leaned toward the heavenly, with waitstaff dressed like angels and brightly colored stuffed parrots on wires streaking by overhead.

  Our guy certainly has a thing for metaphor, Horatio thought. He was on the topmost level, staring through the transparent floor at people playing in the pool. A wet bar was set up in the middle, a little tropical island populated by bartenders in swimsuits.

  Horatio studied the bar and its patrons, thinking, Innocence beneath sin. But the upper level represents heaven and the bottom is clearly hell—putting innocence above sin, not below.

  Of course, this whole place could be seen as sinful— especially by one as judgmental as our kidnapper. So what lies beneath Hades?

  Horatio knew there was such a place—in Greek mythology, at least. Tartarus, the place where Zeus imprisoned the Titans after overthrowing them, taking the crown of Olympus for himself. It was a place supposedly worse than Hades itself—an underworld for monsters and deposed gods.

  Tartarus was also where the punishment was supposed to fit the crime—as in the case of Tantalus, who was imprisoned in a pool of clear water, with grapes over his head. When he bent to take a drink, the water receded; when he reached for the grapes, they ascended out of reach. The very word tantalize came from his name. His crime? Having dined with the gods, he made the mistake of sharing his dinner conversation with other mortals.

  Horatio studied the pool beneath him, glanced at a bowl of fresh fruit on a small marble pedestal a few feet away, then moved his gaze to the young, enthusiastic dancers on the floor. A veritable cornucopia, in more ways than one . . . All right. So who in Tartarus is an innocent, and how are they being punished?

  His eyes fell on the bartenders below.

  The young man dripping water on the floor in front of Horatio was tanned, muscular, and wore only a pair of baggy, floral-decorated shorts. He had introduced himself as Connor Kincaid and taken Horatio down to the lowest level, where young women in skintight scarlet suits and devil horns served drinks to customers lounging around on the many couches and overstuffed chairs. Soft electronica warbled from hidden speakers. “It’s where people go to chill,” Connor had told him. “Despite the whole infernal-pit-of-hell thing.”

  Connor had grabbed a white towel along the way, and now he was briskly drying himself off. “They heat the pool and crank the air-conditioning,” he said. “You get wet, you lose heat fast. And working on the island, you get wet all the time. They give the customers those giant pump-action water cannons to play with, which is lots of fun—for them.”

  “But not so much for an employee caught in the cross fire?”

  “Cross-drenching is more like it. And since nobody carries money in their swimsuit, the club hands out plastic cards on lanyards, which get used to pay for drinks at the island. Pay, yes—tip, no. People who wouldn’t think anything of dropping a twenty on a table won’t give you a dime if they have to key it in.”

  “So there’s no traditional tip jar on the island? Nothing to put coins in?”

  Connor draped the towel around his neck. “Nah. The only coins I see are at the end of my shift, when the other floors give me a cut of their take. They know how tough it is working the pool.”

  “One more question, if you don’t mind, Connor; what’s management’s policy on fraternization with the customers?”

  Connor rolled his eyes. “Completely off-limits. One of the places down the street got hit with a lawsuit when a bartender groped some student on vacation, and since then there’s a strict hands-off policy. They fired a waitress who was a little too friendly just to show us they meant business.”

  No consorting with the gods, Horatio mused. Tantalizingly close—but no closer. Trapped between heaven and hell, but not for any crime. An innocent . . .

  Horatio thanked him and let him go back to work. He sat, chin in hand, and thought, I’m missing something here.

  “No luck, H?” Delko asked in his ear. Like having an invisible sidekick, Horatio thought. Or maybe a Greek chorus.

  “Not yet,” Horatio said. “How about you?”

  “Nothing on the Freedom Tower, but the Brilliant Batin did perform a show at Gator Paradise six months ago. Found something strange about Afterpartylife, too—the place is owned by some sort of offshore consortium, but I’m having trouble tracing it back.”

  “What kind of trouble, Eric?”

  Delko hesitated. “It’s hard to say, H. Might just be a coincidence, but databases I should have no trouble getting into seem to be having problems. I keep getting rerouted to dead ends. You know?”

  “Yes, I do.” Delko hadn’t come out and said it— not over an FBI channel—but Horatio understood what he’d meant. He meant the kind of interference you got when someone didn’t want you snooping around; someone inside the power structure itself.

  Someone bureaucratic.

  He took out his PDA and called up a website with a mythology database. Tartarus, it seemed, had played host to a number of famous miscreants, including someone named Ixion. When Horatio read the description of the man’s crime—and punishment—he smiled, shook his head, and stood up.

  He made his way back to the middle floor. The white-sand beach around the pool was around ten feet wide, bounded by a raised tile rim next to the water and a gentle incline at the opposite edge. Horatio stepped onto the sand, walked over to poolside, and dropped to one knee. He dug his hand into the sand, forced it as deep as it could go; he got as far as his wrist before he hit bottom. Call it nine inches, give or take. He nodded.

  “Eric? I think I know where our next coin is.”

  “Where?” Sackheim’s curt voice said.

  “Buried in an artificial beach.” Horatio described where he w
as.

  “We’ll get you another metal detector, have you sweep the site,” Sackheim said. “Shouldn’t take you more than an hour—”

  “Our perp isn’t going to make it that easy,” Horatio said. “The previous message referred to a ‘coin of another realm.’ If it’s made of wood or plastic, we’ll have to sift through every square inch.”

  “Then that’s what you’ll do,” Sackheim said. “Even if it takes all night.”

  “Which is exactly what our guy wants. He’s wasting our time on purpose.”

  “To what end?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’ll tell you what I do know—our kidnapper is far too impressed with his own cleverness. He picked the last two places for their metaphorical relevance to Miami itself, and this one because it represents the afterlife—specifically, the mythological version called Tartarus.”

  “So what’s he trying to tell us? That Pathan is already dead?”

  “I don’t think so. One of the souls imprisoned in Tartarus is a killer named Ixion—he was the first Greek to murder one of his own relatives.”

  “So?”

  “So Ixion is the Greek version of Cain. Would you like to know what his punishment was?”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “He was strapped to a spinning wheel. Doomed to go in circles forever—around and around and around . . .”

  “Sounds like you’re reading a lot into this, Lieutenant,” Sackheim said. “I’ve got teams going over data on Cuban refugees, arrests made connected to the Freedom Tower, and crimes relating to alligators. Plus the last coin had a Communist symbol stamped on it, which opens up a whole different can of worms. Our kidnappers could have some sort of grievance involving any one of those factors—”

  “I don’t think so,” Horatio said. “Criminals with a political point to make aren’t known for their subtlety or their patience. So far, we don’t know who they are or what they want—and while the first fact makes sense, the second doesn’t. They want us guessing, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

  “The FBI doesn’t guess, Lieutenant. The FBI extrapolates.”

 

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