Right to Die

by Jeff Mariotte

  Horatio didn’t have any special sixth sense that would let him smell a device that the squad had missed, and the equipment he could use was the same the squad had no doubt already employed. All he had was an unformed hope that if someone was watching the scene (and arsonists and bombers were among the most likely people to do so—they notoriously loved standing among the onlookers at their own crime scenes), he would detonate the second one while Horatio was alone in the house, sparing those who worked for him. He thought of his team as his family, and losing members, as he had lost Tim Speedle, was a loss that was too painful to even think about.

  The floor creaked under his weight. Inside—despite the fact that the wall had been opened up like a sardine can lid—the bitter odor was worse, stronger, intensified by the water the fire department had used to quench the fire. He could taste wet burned wood, as if he’d taken a big bite of ash. Using water to put out the fire would make the collection of evidence even more difficult. He was walking through a thick soup of ash and debris, in which vital clues could be floating away from their points of origin at every second.

  The power of the blast was even more evident in here than it had been outside. A copper pipe that had obviously run straight down from the second floor through an interior wall had been bent at an almost ninety-degree angle, and the end that had been sheared off had penetrated a dense wooden beam. Everything in the house that hadn’t been thrown clear or splintered had been bent away from the seat of detonation by the explosion’s shock wave: aluminum window frames, a light fixture suspended from the ceiling, even a brick fireplace.

  Outside the house, Ryan had started taking pictures. Horatio took a deep breath, figured the place was as safe as it was likely to be, and waved his team inside.

  “We do a full walk-through first,” he said when they joined him. “We’re looking for any obvious evidence. Fragments of the bomb casing, parts of the timer—I think we have to assume at this point that it was a timed device, or remotely detonated, and not set off from inside the house. Ryan, keep that camera handy.”

  Ryan hadn’t stopped taking pictures; capturing every foot of the scene would be critical later. “You bet, H.”

  “Watch your step, everyone,” Horatio added.

  “It’s hard to see through the muck, and we don’t want to break anything.”

  They lined up and walked slowly, not raising their feet up out of the layer of soup on the floor. Their shoes would never survive. They had to cover every inch of the ground floor, which was where the device had gone off—apparently against the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen. The living room faced toward the street, which was why the blast had mostly affected the front of the house. Every few steps, one of them would call a halt and would bag some bit of plastic or metal—in one case a spring, in another a piece of a circuit board—that might have been part of the bomb.

  Or part of a home computer or a microwave oven. They couldn’t know until they got it all back to the lab and studied it more closely.

  They found the first body beside what remained of the wooden interior staircase. It was badly charred, its skin blackened, features vague, as if melted off, beneath the char, but it appeared to be an adult. Its hair was gone. Horatio guessed male but he couldn’t be certain. The body was drawn into a tight fetal position, legs and arms flexed, fists up under the chin. “Classic pugilistic position,” Calleigh said.

  “That’s right, Calleigh,” Horatio agreed. “Indicating extreme heat. Fire dehydrated the muscles, causing them to contract and leaving the victim looking like he or she is curled up in pain.”

  “Or ready for a boxing match,” Eric added.

  Horatio looked at the staircase. Bodies could have fallen from upstairs through the hole blown in the bedroom floor over the living room, but not this one. This person had tried to get to the stairs, possibly to escape. Or maybe this person had heard something downstairs and was going to investigate when the blast went off, knocking him down the stairs, and he landed where the fire could sweep over him. “Definitely ready for a fight,” Horatio said.

  “Severe alligatoring of the wood, too,” Ryan pointed out. He indicated the scaled, alligator-skin-like appearance of the burned staircase wood, where it had taken on a checkered aspect from the heat. “Do you think an accelerant was used in addition to the blast?”

  “We’ll have to find that out, won’t we?” Horatio said. He kept moving, and the others joined him.

  “This wasn’t a homemade explosive, was it?” Ryan asked when they had completed the initial sweep.

  “That depends on what kind of home you come from, I suppose,” Horatio said. “But it wasn’t a Molotov cocktail or gunpowder or a fertilizer and gasoline bomb, no. Not something that could be brewed up in your average kitchen. We’ll have to do some tests, but it looks like high explosives to me.”

  He set the other members of the team to work scooping debris out of the muck and into small piles, to determine if any bits of evidence had been missed the first time through. He went to the seat of the blast, which was where any traces of the explosive were most likely to be found. Although the jagged bits of casing had already been picked up, he thought the explosive device had probably been put on the floor, hidden behind a piece of furniture, a chair or table. Something big enough to disguise its presence but not so big that it would interfere with the blast. Splintered wood backed up his theory, but there wasn’t enough of it left to determine what the wood might have once been part of.

  In a relatively clean spot, he opened his crime scene kit and took out his spot-test kit, a stainless steel box about the size of a small cosmetics case. He opened it to reveal three bottles of reagent, a UV lamp and charger, and the necessary supplies and utensils: test tubes, plastic bags, and the like.

  Picking what seemed a likely section of the scorched, cratered floor close to where the blast had destroyed what the bomb had been sitting on, Horatio turned on the UV light. He swiped a sheet of filter paper against the floor, then blew off the excess dust. There were circles marked on the filter paper. Setting the filter paper down on a paper towel, he took out the first bottle of reagent. With a dropper, he put a drop of the first reagent in one of the circles and waited. The fluid spread throughout the circle and a little over its borders, but the paper didn’t change color. That ruled out TNT as the explosive, which would have shown purple or black under the UV. A drop from the second bottle went into another circle. This one might not react as immediately, so he went ahead with the third bottle.

  As a control, while those drops dried a little, he repeated the process on another sheet of filter paper, which had not been wiped on the floor.

  When he finished that, he checked the first sheet again. The third circle remained blank, but the second one showed blue-black.

  “Interesting,” he said aloud, but mostly to himself.

  “What’d you get, H?” Eric asked from across the room.

  “Reagent B reacts.”

  “Which means RDX or HMX,” a new voice said.

  “The Baby Boomer always uses C-4.”

  Horatio looked up to see Special Agent Wendell Asher walking toward him, taking care not to contaminate the scene. “And C-4 contains RDX, so we have a possible match,” Horatio said. “We’ll get some samples back to the lab and use gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to find out for sure if it’s C-4.”

  “Sounds good,” Asher said. “What else have you got so far?”

  Horatio described what they had found, which admittedly wasn’t much. As he spoke, Asher nodded and interjected a few questions. When Horatio finished, Asher said, “Sure sounds like our guy. Using a timed device, using C-4, timing it to detonate in a home while the victims are asleep—those are all part of his signature.”

  “Excuse me, Horatio,” Calleigh said. “We’re going to take a look upstairs.”

  “Just be very careful, Calleigh. The staircase and floors are treacherous.”

  “Will do.”

/>   Horatio turned his attention back to the FBI agent. “I don’t know much about your suspect, Special Agent Asher. But I know evidence, and we’ll find whatever’s here. You’ll get our full report when it’s ready. For now, I’d appreciate it if you stayed out of my crime scene, all right?”

  Asher raised his hands defensively and showed an awkward grin. “Absolutely, Lieutenant Caine. No problem at all. I’m around if you need me, but otherwise I’m the invisible man. Okay?”

  “That, sir, will be perfect. Are you working on the hotels and motels and car rental agencies? It would be good if we can find this guy before he strikes again.”

  “Working on it, Lieutenant. In fact, I’ve got some places to check out right now.”

  Horatio watched as the agent backed away, then turned and walked out along the same path he had taken in. Horatio didn’t have much use for FBI agents in general, but at least this guy seemed to know what he was doing. He just didn’t like anyone on his scenes except his own people, when possible, to reduce the possibility of anyone compromising evidence.

  “H!” Eric called from the staircase. Horatio was sealing the filter papers into bags to preserve them, but he looked up at the sound of Eric’s voice. “We’ve got two bodies upstairs. One of them’s a child. We’ve cleared all the rooms, so we’re looking at three vics total.”

  “Thanks, Eric.” The victims were probably Marc Greggs, his wife, and their daughter, but their identities would have to be confirmed at the lab.

  Horatio called over the EMTs and told them where the bodies could be found. “Take care with them,” he said. “And be sure they’re all thoroughly fluoroscoped. There might be bomb fragments inside them, and we’ll need those.”

  As the EMTs went to work, a wave of sadness washed over Horatio, especially for the child. Whatever her parents may or may not have done to attract the attention of a murderer, certainly she had been uninvolved.

  That was the trouble with bombers and arsonists, though. Of every breed of killer, they were the least concerned about collateral damage. They didn’t care who was murdered in their attempts to sow destruction and fear.

  Horatio cared, though. He was more determined than ever to get this guy, and to get him soon.

  10

  AT MIDMORNING, while the rest of the crew finished at the Greggs house or hauled evidence back to the lab for closer examination, Horatio and Calleigh drove out to Hibiscus Island to visit Sidney Greenfield again. The day had turned warm, although not as hot as yesterday, the humidity moderate. A few puffy white clouds added interest to the azure sky. It was the kind of day that made tourists start poring through real estate ads and reminded locals of why they had never left.

  The Greenfield estate hadn’t changed overnight. Horatio thought that maybe it should have, that there should be some physical manifestation of grief that would display itself at the houses of the dead.

  The only difference was that this time, Sidney wasn’t working in the yard. When Horatio rang the doorbell, they had to wait a long time before the golfer answered the door. He was dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt, his sandy hair uncombed, face unshaven. He had clearly not slept well, if at all. Horatio thought he might have been drinking, too, but his breath smelled like mouthwash, not booze.

  “Caine, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right, Mister Greenfield. And this is Calleigh Duquesne from the crime lab. May we come in for a minute?”

  Sidney gave a desultory nod and beckoned them into a grand foyer, floored in Italian marble, with a few pieces of fine antique furniture. A tiny painting on the wall, in an ornate gold frame, looked like an original Rembrandt. Golf had done very well for Sidney Greenfield. “You find out anything more about Wendy?” he asked. “I still can’t really get my mind around the fact that she’s gone. I’d like to think all those taxes I pay are being put to some useful purpose.”

  “There is one thing, Mister Greenfield,” Horatio said, ignoring the jibe. “You didn’t mention to me yesterday that your wife was pregnant, did you?”

  “Of course, I—” He froze, staring wide-eyed at Horatio. “What are you talking about?”

  “Wendy was pregnant, Mister Greenfield,” Calleigh said gently. “Our medical examiner confirmed it. I’m very sorry.”

  “But she never—I would have…” Sidney stammered. He couldn’t find his way through a sentence, apparently unsure of where he wanted to end up.

  “Maybe she was waiting for a special occasion to tell you,” Horatio suggested. “According to the ME’s findings, she was less than fifteen weeks along.”

  Sidney nodded, but all the life seemed to have been sucked out of him by the news. He appeared to have visibly shrunk, deflated, in the space of two minutes. “Maybe that’s it. She wanted to make sure there wouldn’t be any complications. I think I told you before, Caine, she’s had a pretty tough life. Happiness never came easily to Wendy. Neither did trust. She was probably waiting until she was absolutely sure nothing would go wrong before she said anything.”

  “You did mention that, Mister Greenfield. Once again, we’re very sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” Sidney said. “By the way, the Masters is coming up in Augusta soon, and—”

  “You may not be wearing that green blazer this year, sir,” Horatio interrupted. “I don’t want you leaving Miami just now.”

  “But—”

  “That’s not a request, Mister Greenfield.”

  He and Calleigh left the man alone. When they were in the Hummer, Calleigh turned to Horatio.

  “He seemed genuinely surprised by the news.”

  “Yes, he did, Calleigh,” Horatio said. “Which is a little bit of a surprise itself, isn’t it?”

  “I have some video to show you, H,” Ryan Wolfe said when Horatio and Calleigh made it back to the lab. “Cooper was able to enhance that lousy convenience store video pretty well.”

  “Dan’s a genius at that sort of thing,” Calleigh said.

  “Whatever he did, it sure worked this time.”

  “I’m going to get to work on the bombing scene materials,” Calleigh said. “You men have a good time watching your movies.”

  “We’ll try not to let the smell of popcorn bother you,” Ryan teased.

  Horatio followed Ryan into the A/V lab. The lights were dim, so that whatever Dan put on the monitors would show up better. It didn’t smell at all like popcorn, but like most of the crime lab—with the notable exception of the gun lab—the air had a bland, odorless quality because of the high-tech air filtration system running at full power all the time.

  “Time for some show-and-tell?” Cooper asked.

  “That’s what Mister Wolfe says. What do you have for me?”

  “I don’t know if you saw the tape originally,” Cooper said. “But it was pretty weak. Grainy, bad focus, and I think they reuse the same VHS tapes until they literally fall apart. The whole system was probably made in the seventies—I’m just glad it’s not Betamax. I was able to digitize the footage and enhance it, though, and this is what I came up with.”

  He pushed a button on a remote control, and an image flickered to life on one of the monitors. It showed the inside of the Quick Spree, as seen from behind the sales counter. A clerk sat on a stool in the foreground, doing Sudoku puzzles on the counter.

  “He’s using a pencil,” Ryan said with a chuckle.

  “You don’t?”

  “Of course not. That’s cheating. Anyway, the graphite gets all over your hands.”

  “Yes, it does.” Horatio kept watching. The front door opened, and a pretty, voluptuous blond woman entered wearing a tight white top and pants. She paused for a second just inside the door, as if letting an imagined audience get a good view of her physique, then sauntered over to the candy section. She stayed there for a minute or so, bending over to peruse the racks, pressing her finger to her chin, finally settling on a pack of gum. When she paid for it she smiled at the clerk as if he were a Hollywood producer and she a des
perate starlet. Then she walked back outside.

  “That’s Wendy Greenfield,” Horatio said. “Interesting performance.”

  “Right,” Ryan agreed. “Like she knows she’s being observed.”

  “Body like that, she’s probably used to being gawked at,” Cooper pointed out.

  “That’s true. But this is Miami, too. Beautiful women are hardly a rarity here.”

  “Doesn’t mean they aren’t appreciated. And that market’s a long way from South Beach.”

  “Also true.” There were more models per capita in South Beach than anyplace else in the United States. Sometimes they ventured into other parts of the city, but running into one at a rural Quick Spree was hardly an everyday occurrence.

  “Now we pick her up outside,” Cooper said. There was a momentary flicker and then the scene changed. A camera over the store’s doorway showed the parking lot. Wendy Greenfield went to a white Mitsubishi convertible, opened the driver’s-side door, and sat down behind the wheel. She didn’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere. She took great pains opening her package of gum, then removing a piece, unwrapping it, and placing it in her mouth. As she chewed, she tossed the wrapper out of the car onto the pavement, where it presumably joined its fellow gum wrappers. The camera was off to her right, though, so it was possible—not at all likely, but possible in the same way that world peace and the Easter Bunny were possible—that an open trash container had moved up right beside her car door after she had closed it.

  She kept chewing her gum—mouth open, Horatio could almost hear the smacking despite the lack of audio—for a while, then reached into the car’s glove compartment. From there she withdrew a nail file. Still sitting in the driver’s seat, she continued chewing while also filing her nails. “Does this go on for long, Mister Cooper?” Horatio asked.

  “About fifteen minutes.”