Right to Die

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Fast-forward.”

  “You don’t want to watch the part where she checks her teeth in the rearview? It’s Oscar-worthy.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Cooper fast-forwarded. He wasn’t joking, except about the Oscar. At one point she opened her mouth in front of the mirror, poking and prodding like a dentist doing a self-exam. Eventually she got tired of that and returned to just chewing and staring. Horatio could tell why Sidney had initially been attracted to her—she was a genuinely stunning woman. But on the tape, she came across as vacuous, and he couldn’t quite see how she had retained Sidney’s interest.

  Cooper slowed the footage down to regular speed again. “Here’s where it all goes down,” Ryan said.

  A man walked around the corner and into the frame, his face turned away from the camera. As the witness had told Ryan and Calleigh, he was tall and athletically built, with brown hair curling over his collar. He wore faded jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, darkened down the sides with streaks of sweat, and he walked with a confident swagger that didn’t match the downcast angle of his head.

  Unless, Horatio thought, he’s just trying to hide his face. Does he already know the camera’s there?

  The man walked past the car without seeming to look at it. Then he stopped and turned toward Wendy Greenfield. By now his back was to the camera, and he stood with his bulk blocking its view of her face as well. “That’s strange, isn’t it?” Horatio asked.

  “It’s like he had it all paced off ahead of time,” Ryan said. “Like he knew exactly what the camera’s angle of view was and how to get in front of it.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking, Ryan.”

  The man raised his shirt and pulled out something, but there was no way to know if it was a gun, a knife, or something else. He held it in front of him, out of camera range. Wendy’s hands remained on the steering wheel. “Mister Cooper,” Horatio said. “Could you zoom in on her hands?”

  “Her hands? No problem.” He froze the action and moved in tight on the hands, which barely showed around the man’s body. Zooming in blurred the image, so he punched a few keys and sharpened it. “How’s that?”

  “That’s perfect. Look at those hands, gentlemen. If she was frightened by whatever it is he’s showing her, wouldn’t she be gripping the wheel more tightly, her knuckles going white?”

  “That’s what I’d expect to see,” Ryan said.

  “But they’re not, are they?” In fact, she held on to the wheel loosely, hands dangling, as casual as when she had just been chewing gum and staring into space.

  “Not at all,” Ryan agreed. “We can’t see her face, but her body language hasn’t changed a bit.”

  “As if the whole scene were staged,” Horatio said. “As if this weren’t a real carjacking at all. Let’s keep watching, Daniel.”

  Cooper tapped at the keyboard again and the video reverted to its earlier angle. The guy moved around the car again, still managing to keep his face turned away from the camera. Wendy scooted into the passenger seat and the guy got in behind the wheel, started the car, and backed it out of the parking spot, hiding his face all the while.

  “There’s something very wrong about this whole thing,” Horatio muttered. He had agreed with Calleigh that Sidney Greenfield didn’t seem to be acting when they had told him about Wendy’s pregnancy. But he had seemed sincere the first time Horatio met him, too.

  The more he learned about this case, the more nothing added up. He was going to have to take a closer look at Sidney, and find out more about Wendy any way he could.

  Not that he didn’t already have enough to do. Police work was like that, though—never really slow, but alternating between ridiculously hectic and slightly more so. This looked as if it would be one of the “slightly more so” weeks.

  11

  AS MUCH AS HORATIO hated the reason the crime lab even existed—he wasn’t naïve enough to believe it could ever be done away with, but if for some reason people stopped committing violence against one another, he wouldn’t have minded seeking new employment—he liked it when the lab bustled with activity, all of the various analysts and technicians quietly going about their business, white-coated and serious in manner. He enjoyed being surrounded by educated, intelligent people doing what they did best. He liked to walk its halls (slanted, mostly glass-louvered walls creating a sense of motion, an almost underwater sensation that echoed the nearby ocean without literally representing it), checking in on the progress of his people, watching dedicated scientists using their knowledge in pursuit of justice.

  He did so now. Calleigh was inside the protected, muffled confines of her firing range, deeply involved in running tests to determine the strength of the explosive materials used at the Greggs house. She had salvaged some objects from the house—a sheet of metal from the side of the oven, a heavy dining room tabletop, and some of the fragments believed to have been part of the bomb’s casing, and was pressure-testing those objects to work backward toward learning the brisance, or shattering effect, of the explosive materials involved. By pressure testing the objects to find out how much force was needed to cause the dishing exhibited—how much they had been bowed inward—and computing their distance from the seat of detonation, she could get an approximation of the explosive material’s shock wave. It wouldn’t be definitive, but in court it could back up other findings, building the kind of airtight case Horatio liked to see.

  He left her to her work and found Eric Delko and Maxine Valera in the trace lab. They stood close together in their white lab coats, huddled over a printout. “What are we learning?” Horatio asked.

  Valera met his gaze, her head bobbing a little, bleached blond hair moving as it did. She was considerably shorter than Eric, and while she usually focused on DNA, she also knew her way around chemistry. “RDX,” she said.

  “I knew that.”

  “It’s C-4, H,” Eric added. “Just like the Baby Boomer uses.”

  “How much like him?”

  Valera fluttered the sheet of paper at him. “We ran GC/MS on the samples from the scene, and compared the results to results from previous bombings attributed to the Baby Boomer, according to the Bureau’s records,” she explained. “Ninety-one percent cyclotrimethylene-trinitramine, a little more than five percent polyisobutylene as a binder, and di(2-ethylhexyl) sebacate, as a plasticizer to make it malleable. No taggants, which are—”

  “Chemical markers used to make the material identifiable,” Horatio said.

  Valera smiled awkwardly. “—something you already know all about.”

  “I do,” Horatio said. “But I’m interested in the rest of it, especially the match to the Baby Boomer’s previous devices.”

  “It’s a perfect match,” Eric said. “Either it’s the same stuff, or it’s at least from the same original source.”

  “And that source is?”

  “Not domestic,” Eric said. “Maybe Russia, maybe Iran, maybe one of the former Soviet bloc countries. We just don’t know. But it’s not from our stockpiles, or there would be a taggant.”

  “Which could mean that we’re dealing with a foreign national, couldn’t it?” Horatio suggested.

  “A terrorist.”

  “He’s definitely a terrorist,” Eric agreed. “If you define a terrorist as someone who uses violent acts to send a political or social message. But based on the targets he’s chosen so far, he sounds more like the homegrown variety.”

  “Yes, he does,” Horatio said. “But since the C-4 isn’t domestic, we can’t rule out a foreigner.”

  “Can’t rule much out yet,” Eric said.

  “But we’ll keep at it. Thanks, folks,” Horatio said. “Keep trying to pin down the source of that C-4. We find out where it came from, we’ll have a better idea of who’s using it.”

  “Got it, boss,” Valera said.

  In another part of the lab he came across Natalia Boa Vista sitting in front of a computer monitor, her right hand cupping the
mouse as she read something on the screen. “Ms. Boa Vista,” he said.

  “Anything interesting on there?”

  “I’m actually not doing science for a change,” she said. “Just research.”

  “Into what?”

  “Into Wendy Greenfield,” she explained. “So far it’s involved reading a lot of old society columns and articles in Ocean Drive magazine. And golf magazines—they tend to mention her a lot, so it shows up in the search engine listings, but they mostly just show her picture and say that she’s married to Sidney. Or was.”

  “Have you learned anything that might be useful?”

  “Well, you never know what will be useful, do you? So far it’s pretty much the poor-girl-marries-well story. She grew up in a broken home over in Fort Myers. Her parents were well known to the social workers and the local police, but her dad took off when she was ten. Somehow she managed to get out of there and into Sidney’s field of view. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  “Wendy’s history is still being written,” Horatio reminded her. “And we’re the ones who will write the final chapter. Keep me posted, Natalia.”

  “Will do.”

  “Have you seen Mister Wolfe anywhere?”

  “Last I heard he was headed down to the garage to process Wendy’s car.”

  “Perfect,” Horatio said. “Thank you.”

  He started that way, but in the atrium he saw a young woman sitting on a leather sofa by the angled glass wall. She was lost in thought, hunched forward a little. Her brown hair was cut short, but she was tall and slender, her arms and long legs pale, as though they hadn’t been in the sun recently. A big leather purse sat on the floor at her feet, its strap looped over her knee. She looked familiar, but different, and it took him a few seconds to realize who it was. “Nina?”

  She saw him coming toward her and brightened as surely as if someone had clicked on a floodlight. “Horatio!” she cried, jumping up from the bench. She sprang to him and enveloped him in a crushing hug. She smelled like the ocean on a fresh spring day.

  He held her for a long moment, then released her and stepped back. Her eyes were just as he remembered, big and brown, drooping slightly at the outer edges, but with a fierce intelligence behind them. “Does Calleigh know you’re here?”

  “The receptionist paged her,” Nina said. “She’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Why don’t I take you back to her? How have you been?”

  “I’m great,” she said, but then her face clouded over. “Mostly great. I mean, I love college, and where I’m living. I’ve made some wonderful friends there, and Chicago is the most amazing city.”

  “How’s your mother?” he said, leading her down the hall toward the gun lab.

  “She’s good. Fine. You know, she still worries about me a lot.”

  “She always will. That’s what mothers do.”

  “I don’t know if Calleigh told you, Horatio. And please don’t be disappointed in me—”

  “Never, Nina.”

  “—thank you. But I’m a little bit pregnant.”

  “I thought that was an either/or proposition.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  He stopped and turned to face her again. “And how do you feel about it?”

  She shrugged. “Honestly? Petrified. I mean, my boyfriend, like, vanished when I told him the news. He’s still there at school, physically, but he might as well be invisible. When I run into him around campus, it’s like he’s made of stone. He just gives me this face that says, ‘Don’t ruin my life,’ and he won’t talk to me. So I guess boyfriend isn’t the right word anymore.”

  “It doesn’t sound like it.”

  “And that means it’s all on me, right?”

  “He can be compelled to do his share, Nina. Financially, at least.”

  “Yeah, I know. But if he doesn’t want to be involved, then I’m not sure I want him involved anyway. Like if he has to give me money, is he going to one day feel like he has a right to interfere in our lives?”

  “He may decide that anyway, Nina. People can be unpredictable, especially where families are involved.”

  “I guess I know that as well as anyone.”

  “I guess you would.”

  Horatio couldn’t help being impressed by the newfound maturity of the girl he had known as a young teen. It was a maturity tempered by the optimism, and perhaps the naïveté, of youth, but to him it felt reasoned and real in spite of that. She had been through more than most young girls, and the fact that she had survived it at all was a testament to her strength.

  “So do you think I’m insane to want to have my baby?”

  He took her hand in his and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Nina, I don’t think you’re insane at all,” he said, holding her gaze with his. “I think you’ll make the right decision, and you’ll do fine no matter what decision you make.”

  “Thank you, Horatio.”

  “And if there’s anything I can do to help you, all you have to do is ask. You know that, right?”

  “I know. Thank you,” she said again.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s go find Calleigh, shall we?”

  12

  BURNED BODIES AND body parts were hard to work with. Human flesh was remarkably supple stuff under most circumstances. But apply intense enough heat to almost any substance composed largely of water and it will dehydrate, turning stiff and brittle. Because about half the body weight of human beings came from the water contained in their cells—called intercellular fluid—the same thing happened to people.

  As badly burned as the victims taken from the Greggs house were, Alexx knew they required special care even above and beyond that which she usually gave those entrusted to her. Although their skin was charred, the outer tissue entirely burned away in spots, they still needed to be thoroughly examined. Sometimes fires were set to disguise homicides. She didn’t think that was the case here—from what she had heard, she suspected that the fire was a side effect of the bomb, and it was either the shock wave of the blast or smoke inhalation from the fire that had killed these three. But suspecting was different than knowing, and she needed to know.

  Beyond that, she had to try to positively identify the victims. They were believed to be Doctor Marc Greggs, his wife Sally, and their daughter Maggie, but that again was supposition, not fact.

  She started with the one who appeared to be an adult male, the victim found in the boxer’s position, who was the most badly burned of the three. He had been downstairs, where the fire was, instead of upstairs like the two females. His muscles had relaxed slightly since the fire had been put out and he’d been taken away from the scene, but he remained curled in on himself, his arms up in front of his chest. The first thing she wanted to check on, even before trying to identify him, was whether or not he had sustained his burns before or after death.

  When a living human suffered a burn, white blood cells, or leucocytes, migrated to the site of the injury and blistered the skin, causing an inflammation called hyperemia. The liquid that caused the blistered tissue could be lab-tested for a positive protein reaction. Postmortem burns tended to be more yellowish, harder, and any liquid present would not produce the same protein reaction.

  “What do you have to tell me, darlin’?” Alexx asked the burned corpse. “I know it had to hurt.” Finding out if the burns had come before or after death could let the investigators know how many separate crimes they were looking at. It seemed unlikely, but the possibility that the bomb had been set off in order to hide the prior murder of the three victims couldn’t be entirely discounted. Setting odds wasn’t her job, but she had to take that chance into consideration. “The good part is your pain’s over with now.”

  She found some blistering on his anconeal region—his right elbow, in lay terms—and scraped it into a petri dish, which she set aside on one of the stainless steel counters surrounding her, for closer study. As a backup test, she pried open the victim’s mouth and looked at the mu
cobuccal folds. They were black with trapped soot and ash, almost certainly indicating that the victim had still been breathing after the fire started. His lung tissue would confirm it.

  “You died hard, honey,” Alexx said, trying not to imagine the terror he must have felt at the sound of the blast, the force of the shock wave driving wood fragments into him, the tumble down the stairs, and finally the roar of the flames as they enveloped him. She had lived through that, hunkered under a fire blanket with Eric Delko while fire blazed around them out in the Everglades, and it had been one of the most horrifying experiences in her life. She hoped this man was in shock by that point, still breathing but not understanding what was about to happen to him, not experiencing the agony as the heat sapped the moisture from his body and cooked him alive. She shook away the memory of the deafening roar, the searing heat, and returned her focus to the man on her table. “It’s time to start working on figuring out who you are, isn’t it?”

  There were various ways she could try to do that. Fingerprints, even when the hands were seriously burned, could still retain some of their distinctive ridge patterns. After bad burns, the scars themselves could help in identification, albeit only in the case of someone who survived the burn event. She would try to get a ten-card off this vic, but having glanced at his finger pads she didn’t hold out a lot of hope that it would help much. The way his fists clenched would make printing him difficult, and the severity of his burns would make matching his prints to existing databases tricky.

  Dental work was only marginally more promising. When she had opened his mouth to look for signs of smoke inhalation, she noticed that a lot of the soft tissue had been damaged by the fire, which would have loosened teeth and allowed them to shift in his mouth. He would no longer match his last X-rays. If there was enough soft tissue left, a full reconstruction might be possible, which would allow her to match X-rays, but without that she would be left with just whatever fillings and other dental work were recoverable from individual teeth.

  Likewise, although his skin had been horribly damaged, she might find inorganic parts—implants, pins or stents, or even a pacemaker—that carried serial numbers and could be traced back.