Right to Die

by Jeff Mariotte

  Joe Castaneda lowered his hands. Tears

  traced down his cheeks. “Where…”

  “Your son is in our morgue, Mister Castaneda,” Horatio explained. “He’s being well taken care of there while we determine exactly what happened and who killed him. We’ll release him to you as soon as we can, so if you’d like to make arrangements—”

  “My wife, she—”

  “Faustina told us that your wife was also shot, and I’m very sorry. We try to do our best for every crime victim, but some cases aren’t solved immediately. Some take years, and I can’t lie to you, some are never solved.”

  “Because the cops don’t care about our people,” Faustina said. “That’s why our people have to join gangs, so we’ll have someone who will look out for us. Everybody knows the po-po don’t give a damn.”

  “That, young lady, is not true. We care about every victim.” Horatio paused. “I care. And I guarantee you, I will do everything in my power to get at the truth. I will find out who killed your brother.”

  Faustina Castaneda didn’t answer him. Not with words, anyway. But her deep brown eyes locked on his, dry and bitter, and told him everything.

  She didn’t believe him.

  He would just have to prove her wrong.

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  Pocket Star Books

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  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Alliance Atlantis Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.

  ALLIANCE ATLANTIS with the stylized “A” design TM Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. Used under license. All rights reserved.

  CSI: Miami and related marks are trademarks of CBS Broadcasting Inc. and outside USA is a trademark of Alliance Atlantis Productions Inc.

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  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-7982-3

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-7982-6

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  Acknowledgments

  Many experts helped with the science in this book. Anything I got right can likely be credited to them; mistakes are solely my own. Among others, I’d like to thank Janeen Crockett and Lisa Reed of Cochise College, and Dr. D. P. Lyle, MD.

  Great thanks also to Anthony Zuiker, CSI mastermind, the producers and writers of CSI: Miami, and David Caruso and the incredible actors who bring it all to life.

  1

  EMILIO DURAZO TURNED away from the glare spiking at him off the water of Biscayne Bay and adjusted his plastic safety goggles. He could feel them pressing into his skin; they would leave red marks, rings around his eyes, for hours after he was done here. His wife would call him “raccoon” when he got home at dinnertime.

  For safety reasons his employer, a landscaping contractor working for Miami’s Department of Parks and Recreation, liked him to wear the glasses, a face mask, bulky ear protectors, and long sleeves—in spite of the April morning’s warmth—when he used a weed whacker. He also wore a straw cowboy hat and long canvas work pants. It was true that one never knew what kind of debris the spinning lines might kick up. At home, outside dry, dusty Hermosillo, Mexico, he had never encountered the sort of thick vegetation that grew in south Florida, and the few times he had used weed eaters there, they hurled small stones and sharp sticks every which way. He had been a skilled electrician, and had hired a gardener to look after his small yard, but when the weak economy had destroyed his business he headed north, like so many others, in search of whatever work he could find.

  Today he would need the power cutter, because he’d be tackling a patch of tall growth that he had been putting off for a couple of weeks. Since arriving in Florida he had been amazed by the speed with which the plants grew, as different as could be from his arid home.

  But then, everything in Miami was different. The humidity, the amber sunsets and pastel buildings, the beautiful, wealthy people he saw everywhere. Miami had an undeniable Latin beat but filtered through a coastal atmosphere, beach culture, and buzzing nightlife. He suspected no place on Earth was quite like it. Certainly not the deserts of Sonora.

  Properly suited up, Emilio tugged on the motor’s starter cord. The machine roared to life and he headed for the thick stretch of out-of-control grass he had to tame before lunch. Twin black lines whirled, and when he brought the machine’s cutting head to the grass, barely skirting the ground, the whirling plastic lines sliced easily through the vegetation.

  Within minutes he had chopped the first section, about a meter square. The cut grass, formerly half a meter high in spots, was scattered around him, bits of it plastered to his pants and work boots. Emilio raised the weed eater’s head and balanced the machine in his right hand, peeling off his hat with his left and using that forearm to wipe sweat off his forehead. Then he stuck the hat back in place, ready to tackle the next section. He figured he could complete the whole task in about an hour, then take a break for his bag lunch and a bottle of water. After that he could rake up the grass and move on to his next project.

  He lowered the weed eater’s head to the grass again. In the deepest grass, beside a stretch of concrete block wall on which graffiti needed to be painted over, an indentation caught his eye. He waded through the thickest of it, rubbing flecks of vegetation off his goggles, until he could see what had crushed the grass down.

  Madre de Dios! he thought, instinctively crossing himself.

  Maybe he wouldn’t be home in time for dinner after all…

  Lieutenant Horatio Caine stood on the manicured lawn of Bicentennial Park, hands on his hips, watching a cabin cruiser slice the surface of the bay. Around him was a beehive’s worth of activity. Uniformed officers had strung yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape from trees, establishing the perimeter within which Horatio’s team of CSIs would work. Tourists, joggers, businesspeople, park employees, and others had gathered outside the tape but were kept from crossing it by the presence of the uniforms. Inside the perimeter, Medical Examiner Alexx Woods knelt by the corpse of a young male, which a gardener had found in the grass near a wall that delineated a particular section of the park. Criminalist Ryan Wolfe crouched beside her with a camera in his hands. Detective Frank Tripp talked to the gardener, while criminalist Eric Delko searched the area for shell casings or any other evidence left behind.

  Horatio liked to stand back when he could, to view a body in situ, as the early Roman crime scene investigators would have said—and there had been, he knew, crime scene investigators in ancient times—although they w
ould have had much more primitive technologies available to them, and the causes of crime were more often attributed to things like demonic possession or an imbalance in a person’s “humours,” according to Hippocrates. Taking the long view of a crime scene before getting into the close-up work of looking for hairs and fibers, transfer from a killer, bullets, and the like, enabled Horatio to gain needed perspective on a crime. He liked to see where the participants had entered and exited the scene, liked to know what they saw around them, how sheltered they were from public view (if at all), what natural or manmade obstacles they might have encountered.

  To solve a murder, one had to be able to answer all these questions and more. The close-up stuff was crucial, but the long view helped too. Hands on his hips, his blazer flared out behind him, his sunglasses safely tucked around his neck inside his open collar, he turned, taking in the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of park and bay (Watson Island and then Miami Beach gleaming on the far side, like a mirage made of money and opportunity), of trees and grass and pathways, a maintenance shed, streets and businesses in the background.

  Frank Tripp approached Horatio, his balding, blunt, pale head gleaming in the sunshine. The Texas transplant tucked two fingers under his collar and turned his head. His striped tie was knotted tightly, as always, and he wore a light green suit over a white shirt. “Gonna be a hot summer, if this keeps up,” he said.

  “It could well be, Frank. Did you get anything from the gardener?”

  “Not much,” Frank said. “Guy’s uncomfortable talking to cops. I’m pretty sure he’s an illegal.”

  “I don’t have the slightest interest in his immigration status,” Horatio said. “I just want to know what he saw.”

  “Short answer? Nothin’. He was cuttin’ the grass, found the body. No one around when he got here at eight, so the guy got killed sometime during the night or early morning.”

  “If you think you’ve got everything he knows, Frank, I don’t have a problem with cutting him loose. He’s not likely to get any more work done around here today.”

  “I’ll let him know,” Frank said. Horatio watched the detective walk away, his solid bulk like a physical manifestation of his commitment to the job. As with Horatio and his entire crew at the Miami-Dade Police Department Crime Lab, concern for the victims of crime drove Frank. In his long law enforcement career, first in New York, then Miami, Horatio didn’t think he had known many better cops.

  “Horatio!” He looked over at the sound of his name and saw Alexx Woods beckoning him toward the patch of tall grass, partially shaded by the wall, that obscured the body. An open-necked magenta blouse set off her brown skin beautifully, and she wore it with a black suit—all business, but with a sense of style undeniably her own. She squatted in the grass. Horatio knew she’d have preferred to keep the suit clean, but the needs of the deceased overruled any sartorial preferences on her part.

  “You’re going to want to see this.”

  He started toward her and Ryan. “What is it, Alexx? You have a cause of death?”

  “No COD until we’re back in the lab.” She threw him a smile that silently added, But you knew that.

  “But I think we have some good candidates.”

  Some? Alexx didn’t choose her words imprecisely. “Do tell.”

  She and Ryan waited until he was close enough to see the body: a Hispanic male, probably in his early twenties or late teens. He wore baggy blue nylon pants and a jacket over a red T-shirt, with expensive sneakers. His skin was dark olive, hair black, cropped short. With his square jaw and high cheekbones, he had been a handsome kid.

  As Horatio approached, Ryan pointed out a neat hole in the young man’s chest, through the shirt. “Here’s one entry wound,” he said. “Upper torso.”

  “One?” Horatio repeated. The shot looked like a heart wound, and would probably have been sufficient to kill the man. He scanned the body but didn’t see any more injuries.

  “Help me turn him,” Alexx said. Ryan lifted the man’s shoulder and pushed. Together they raised his back off the ground, and Alexx drew aside the jacket. On his back was an exit wound—raw and ragged, the shirt matted to his back with blood—a few inches above what could only be another entry wound.

  “And here’s the other,” Ryan said, pointing to the smaller, neater of the holes.

  “Along with a single exit wound,” Horatio noted.

  “That’s right,” Alexx said. “One bullet was a through-and-through, and the other must still be inside him.”

  “So he was shot twice,” Horatio said. “Maybe he turned after the first shot struck him? Shot in the back first?”

  “There’s no indication of that from the way the grass is flattened,” Ryan said. He was a young officer, a relatively recent transfer from patrol. Horatio had taken a chance on him, and he had proven his worth many times over. He looked up at Horatio, heavy brown eyebrows arched, still holding most of the weight of the dead man. “It looks like he was standing here—maybe with someone else—and then he got shot, twice, and fell down. He might have swiveled, but he didn’t move his feet.”

  “I’ll leave it to Calleigh to make the final determination,” Alexx added, “but to me it looks like he was shot with two different caliber bullets. From two different directions.” She nodded toward the bay, then back toward the city streets. “Over there and over there.”

  “I see,” Horatio said. He nodded and Alexx and Ryan lowered the body carefully back to its original position, faceup in the grass. “What makes you think he had a companion, Mister Wolfe?”

  “Not a companion,” Ryan said. “And not the shooter—both wounds are distance wounds, not close-up. But the grass was trampled about eighteen inches in front of him, and there are two trails where they walked through the highest part. The other person used the same path to leave.”

  “Careful,” Horatio said. “Or maybe concerned about leaving clues.”

  “That’s right. So I’m thinking maybe the second person was more of a customer than a companion. I don’t see any signs of panic, so I think their transaction was completed before the shooting started.”

  “A customer?”

  Ryan held up a small glassine envelope that contained a white powder. “The victim’s jacket pockets were full of cocaine,” he said. “No weapons, no cash, but plenty of coke, both powder and rock.”

  “Someone robbed him after he was shot,” Horatio mused, “but didn’t take the drugs? What kind of a criminal does that?”

  “You got me,” Ryan said.

  “We’ll have to find out,” Horatio said. “Someone caught our victim in a cross fire, then kept a cool enough head to use an existing path through the grass, take the weapon and cash that we have to assume a drug dealer would be carrying, and leave the dope behind.”

  “That’s the way it looks,” Alexx said. “I’ll know more when I get this young man on my table.”

  “We’ll all know more soon, Alexx. Drug dealer or no, our victim is counting on us to find his killer, isn’t he?” Horatio said. “And that, my friends, is what we are going to do.”

  2

  “YOU WEREN’T READY for this, were you?” Alexx Woods looked at the face of the deceased. At the outer corner of his right eye, someone had tattooed a single black teardrop, as if he mourned for a death he had known would come to him too early.

  Even people who suspected that were never quite prepared for how early, she had found.

  Sometimes, in the gang world, teardrops signified a murder committed or the death of a loved one. She hoped it was the latter, in this case, as the victim looked too youthful—and, in peaceful repose on her stainless steel autopsy table, too innocent—to already be a killer as well as a dealer. Hard experience had taught Alexx that there was no minimum age for that, but if she couldn’t hang on to her optimism about people, she couldn’t come to work every day in the morgue.

  The young man had been brought from the park in a clean body bag, after she and Ryan had secured pap
er bags over his hands and given the okay to move him. At the morgue, he was removed from the body bag and placed on Alexx’s autopsy table. After taking the paper bags from his hands—placed there to make sure no evidence, such as epithelials, or skin cells, he might have scratched from an attacker, was lost or contaminated—she weighed and measured him, determining that he was five feet, six inches tall and weighed one hundred and seventy pounds. She noted those facts, along with her initial identification of him as a Hispanic male, on a digital record of her autopsy. She speculated that he was still in his late teens, but she could narrow that down further as she went. No identification had been located on the body. She inked his fingertips and rolled those onto a ten-card, then sent the card over to a fingerprint tech at the crime lab to run against local and national databases.

  “I need you to tell me some things, honey,” she said as she walked his length, her practiced eye examining his clothing and what skin she could see. He smelled of heavy tobacco use; the stink of smoke had wafted from the body bag as soon as it had been unzipped. “I need you to tell me who you are. I need you to tell me the cause, manner, and mechanism of your death. And if you can, I need you to tell me who killed you. Can you do that for me?”

  The dead man didn’t answer her. They never did—not verbally, at any rate. Alexx spoke to the dead so she could speak for them, so she could take what their bodies told her and put it into words in a report. The dead needed her voice because their own voices had been stilled. She had put herself through an ordeal of schooling that ground down and spat out many people—college, medical school, a one-year medical internship, a four-year pathology residency, and a yearlong forensic pathology fellowship—to be able to provide that service.

  During that time, she had worked with people who referred to the deceased as “the body, the corpse,” or worst of all, “it.” No matter how brilliant those people were otherwise, she found her respect for them minimized by that. The dead people she encountered were still people, not empty vessels or husks, and she had no patience for those who felt otherwise.