Right to Die

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Done time for what?”

  Bridget shrugged and scratched the corner of her mouth again. “Whatever. There were quite a few of them in those days. Small-time wiseguys mostly, you know, but they kind of passed us around, right? Hook up with one guy for a while, then another, and like that.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “That was kind of the point.”

  “Was she still in touch with any of these men?”

  “I have no idea. These last five years or so, we haven’t really been in touch with each other that much,” Bridget said. “She sends me checks, which is sweet as hell, but we don’t really talk. It’s like she finally decided to put it all behind her and just be the golfer’s wife.”

  “So you don’t know if one of those wiseguys you mentioned might have killed her.”

  “Anything’s possible, right? Maybe one of them tried to blackmail her or something, and they fought. Or maybe Sidney found out about them and got pissed off.”

  Both possibilities had occurred to Natalia, and Bridget hadn’t narrowed the options much. “But you couldn’t say which one? No particular guy who seems more likely than the others?”

  “Can I stand up?”

  “Of course,” Natalia said.

  Bridget rose from her chair and stretched, arms way over her head, until her back popped loudly. She still had a stripper’s body, lithe and sinuous. “Ahh,” she said. “That’s good. Anyway, it probably could have been just about any of them. She wouldn’t have told me if she still talked to any of them, much less—you know, more than talked. But I wouldn’t think so. When she moved to Miami with Sidney she kind of cut off her past, you know? Like she wanted to pretend she didn’t come from that background.”

  “I guess we all do things we’re not that proud of.” Natalia had her share, including reporting to her federal employers on goings-on at the lab—even though she only reported the positive things her lab mates did, she still felt like an informer, and it had taken the others a long time to forgive her.

  Bridget laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, long and hacking. When she finished, her eyes were watering. “I’ve done more than my share, sister. Things I’m not proud of, men I’m not proud of. But I don’t think I’ve done any murderers, and if you’d asked me, I would’ve said the same about Wendy.”

  “Does the name Lyall Douglas mean anything to you?”

  She gave it a moment’s consideration, wrinkling her nose while she thought. “It might be sorta familiar, but not really. Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “All right. If you think of anything else, Bridget, or remember any particular guys you think might have been especially bad news, please call me, okay?” Natalia put her card on the table in front of the other woman. Bridget palmed it and slid it into her pocket.

  “I will,” she promised. “You find out who killed her, okay? We were as tight as sisters once, and even if that’s in the past, I still feel like someone ripped out part of my heart.”

  “We’ll find out,” Natalia assured her. “That’s what we’re all about here. And we’re very good at what we do.”

  Horatio had stepped outside the house to breathe some fresh Miami air for a minute when his phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID. “Ms. Boa Vista,” he answered. “What’s up?”

  “Horatio,” Natalia said. “Like I told you, I was doing some digging around on Wendy Greenfield.”

  “Yes. You learned something?”

  “I think maybe so. She likes bad boys, so on a hunch, I checked out the visitor logs for your guy Lyall Douglas, last time he was in Miami-West.”

  “And?”

  “Wendy visited him there. Numerous times.”

  “That is interesting, Natalia. I wonder if her husband knows about that.”

  “There’s more, Horatio. I cross-checked under her name, and he’s not the only inmate she’s apparently friendly with.”

  “Keep going.” He watched Alexx Woods heading into the building to begin her examination of the victims, and tossed her a nod and a grim smile. She wiggled her fingers at him, but he could see that she was bracing herself, mentally and emotionally, for what she would encounter inside.

  “She also visited a man named Tony Aldicott, who’s currently in jail on a DUI. He’s been in for three months of an eighteen-month sentence. He’s been inside before, too, and he and Lyall used to be cell mates, a few years ago.”

  “Very interesting,” Horatio said.

  “Yesterday, Tony was on a work detail, doing some roadside clean-up. Guess where?”

  Horatio wasn’t big on guessing games. “Where?”

  “About three miles from where Wendy’s car was found.”

  “Fascinating.” An image was coming together in Horatio’s mind, a picture of how the disparate facts that he knew about Wendy’s case might all fit together. It was not quite a guess—more of a supposition based on what he had learned so far. Police work was all about filling in the holes between what was known and what wasn’t, then testing the suppositions one had reached.

  Either Wendy and Lyall were an item first, or Wendy and Tony were. She met one man while visiting the other, or else in between stints in jail. Whichever way it happened, she started an affair with the second man. Hence the private visits to both of them in prison. One way or another, the three were friends, and Lyall and Wendy had decided that it was time to bust Tony out. Horatio was willing to bet the clothing found in her trunk fit Tony Aldicott and would be used to replace his prison orange jumpsuit after the shotguns were put into play. In case they were caught or observed, she and Lyall faked the carjacking, so she could claim to be a victim and not jeopardize her marriage to her wealthy husband—a marriage no doubt loaded with benefits for her boyfriends as well as for herself.

  Probably, he thought, the reason she wanted Tony out was because of her pregnancy. She didn’t want the father of her child rotting in jail while she gave birth. Perhaps she hadn’t even spilled the fact of her pregnancy to Lyall until the plan had been put together, when she had to explain its urgency. Further, Lyall had probably thought that she was finished with Tony—at least, that way—and that he only had to share Wendy with one man, not two. Not being the husband or the father had probably made Lyall feel like the bottom of the heap.

  So he agreed to the plan, while hatching one of his own—one that would leave her a murder victim, patently on her way to commit a crime. Like most small-time criminals, Lyall Douglas likely suffered under the delusion that the police didn’t put much effort into finding the killers of their fellow crooks.

  If so, he would be in for an unpleasant surprise.

  Maxine Valera was already working up the DNA of Wendy’s fetus. When they found Lyall they’d get a comparison sample from him. It would be easy to obtain one from Tony Aldicott, still an unwilling resident of Miami-West. Horatio didn’t know which one would wind up being the father—probably Tony—but it was entirely possible that Wendy didn’t know for sure either.

  “Horatio?”

  “I’m here, Natalia. That’s terrific work, thank you.”

  “I hope it helps.”

  “It helps a great deal.” He closed the phone and put it away. This had turned into a busy couple of days, and he was glad that they were at least approaching the solution to one of their cases.

  He’d be a lot happier when they found Lyall Douglas.

  He had a feeling it wouldn’t take long now.

  18

  ERIC DELKO HAD BEEN inside some truly disgusting houses.

  Most criminals looked at the rules of house-cleaning the same way they did the rest of society’s laws and mores—with disdain and contempt. He had grown accustomed to seeing rats and maggots in their homes, trash strewn around, dirt and dust and grease coating every surface.

  He was happily surprised to learn that Lyall Douglas was a better housekeeper than most, relatively speaking. The front yard gave no indication that the interior would be cleaner than any other thug’s home
, but inside, while the place was far from neat, at least it wasn’t god-awful. Douglas appeared to own a vacuum cleaner and a broom and maybe even a dust rag, and he knew how to use them. The house smelled like last night’s dinner, and compared to what Eric had expected, that wasn’t a bad thing.

  “I’m surprised,” Calleigh said as they walked inside, echoing what Eric had been thinking.

  “I know, huh? Place isn’t too filthy.”

  “We’ve definitely seen worse.”

  “I like those crime scenes in rich neighborhoods, where the housekeepers keep the place so spic-and-span that the lemon scented cleansers overpower the blood and bodily wastes.” Eric smiled at Calleigh. “Too bad they don’t crop up that often.”

  “If we wanted to surround ourselves with that kind of environment, we could always marry rich,” Calleigh suggested. “Or become housekeepers.”

  “The latter seems more likely in my case.”

  “My luck hasn’t been much better,” Calleigh said. “Anyway, I didn’t think your problem was that you couldn’t find women, it’s that you don’t want to—you know, learn their names and addresses. Or have conversations. Both of which are pretty much prerequisites for marrying, rich or otherwise.”

  Eric glanced away from her. Calleigh knew him, all right. Well enough to know where his buttons were. He liked to play the field.

  That’s putting it mildly, he thought.

  Truth is, Delko, you like to get your rocks off and go home.

  There was, he believed, nothing wrong with that as long as everyone knew the score. The times he had deviated from that pattern, like with Boa Vista, things had turned scary. A pregnancy scare with her—a false alarm, as it turned out—had given him nightmares of parenthood, commitment, a lifetime with just one woman.

  He shook his head, keeping his wry smile away from Calleigh’s gaze. She might well know what it meant, and it would launch her off into another diatribe about his personal life. She accepted him, but that didn’t mean she thought much of his choices.

  “You’re right, Calleigh,” he said. “I guess I can write off the idea of marrying rich. There’s always Powerball, right?”

  “Sure, Eric. And there’s also the chance that one of the drug kingpins we arrest will reward you with a million bucks for turning his life around. Odds are about the same.”

  Lyall Douglas’s house was not, as far as they knew, a crime scene. But they had to put similar effort into processing it. Most people who left a house behind—especially if they left in a hurry—also abandoned clues to their next destination. They weren’t after evidence to put him in jail, necessarily, they just wanted to figure out where he had gone. They carried their crime scene kits and had come fully prepared to process the scene as they would any other.

  “I’ll start in the bedroom,” Calleigh said, glancing at the nudie magazines on the coffee table in the living room. “With any luck all his porn and biologicals will be out here.”

  Eric followed her gaze, saw what she meant. “Sure,” he said. He didn’t want to deal with Douglas’s spilled semen either, but they did need DNA to compare to Wendy’s fetus. Anyway, it wouldn’t hurt to know where it was so he could avoid stepping in it.

  Before he got involved in that, however, he took a good long look at the living room, hoping something would call out to him as a likely starting point. He didn’t see any handy notepads on which Douglas might have written down a forwarding address, bearing down so hard that Eric could decipher it by rubbing a pencil across the next page down. Come to think of it, he had never been quite that lucky. Maybe he had found something that had worse odds than Powerball after all.

  What he did see was mud on the carpet.

  The mud was dark brown, rich looking, fertile. It was dry but maybe hadn’t been for long. Some of it was stacked in a curve that looked like the edge of a shoeprint. More was simply scattered across the floor as if it had fallen from a shoe or from some other object carried through the room. It had been ground into the carpet, but there was what Eric considered a statistically significant amount of it around. He crumbled some between his fingers, finding it soft and moist inside.

  And it hadn’t rained all week.

  He went back out to the department Hummer and fetched the forensic vacuum, a small handheld vacuum cleaner with a long wand-type neck and a chamber that held a paper filter. The filter collected microscopic particles of soil and held it for examination at the lab. Usually that meant analyzing it with an optical comparison microscope or a scanning electron microscope. If the mud turned out to be evidence of a crime—if, say, the mud matched that at the location where Wendy Greenfield’s car had been found—then it would go that far, but at this point Eric didn’t think that would be the case.

  But he thought the mud might offer a clue as to where Douglas had gone—if it was rare or unusual mud, that was, and if in fact it had come from wherever the guy had taken off to instead of a gardening project he’d been working on in the front yard before he left.

  Then again, Eric had seen the front yard. The guy was no big-time gardener.

  “Not much to see in here,” Calleigh reported from the bedroom. “Lyall Douglas sleeps au naturel, judging from the hairs and epithelials in his bedding. And from the fact that his dresser contains no pajamas. And there’s not much underwear for a guy with no washer and dryer in the house.”

  “Thanks for that update,” Eric said. “I might have something here—not sure yet.”

  “Let me know,” Calleigh replied. “The sooner I can stop poking around in this guy’s personals, the better I’ll like it.”

  “I’ll keep you posted,” Eric muttered to himself. A hunch had started niggling around in his brain, and he turned his attention to that, trying to tease it into fully revealing itself.

  He followed the dropped mud through the living room and kitchen (where it had been stepped on, smearing it against old, faded linoleum tile flooring, yellow and black that matched the appliances and the ceramic tiles of the backsplash behind the sink—the kind of kitchen, Eric thought, where he’d expect to see pot holders shaped like honeybees). A back door led out of the kitchen into the backyard, which was not quite as overgrown as the front. Maybe Douglas owned a mower after all.

  Standing in the doorway, at the top of three raw wooden steps that descended down to the yard, Eric scanned the grassy swath. A couple of trails had been beaten down through the grass. One led to a wooden enclosure in which Eric could see the lids of aluminum garbage cans. Presumably the cans were beneath the lids, but the fence hid them from view. Another trail led all the way to the back of the yard, where a line of trees and taller growth probably marked the property line. The grass back there was greener than in the yard, possibly indicating a water source.

  He stepped off the stairs and into the grass, watching before he put down his feet so as not to crush anything that might be important. There didn’t seem to be anything in the yard, though, except yard. But then he found traces of mud—mud that looked like the stuff he had found inside. He kept going.

  At the tree line, he peered through leaves and tall grass and low brush and spreading ferns. He was right. There was a creek back there. At the point where the trail across the yard met the tree line, he saw signs of disturbance. A broken leaf stem on a fern, a leaf that had been trampled into the ground, that kind of thing. Like someone had passed through carefully—just not carefully enough to fool a CSI.

  Eric stepped through, even more carefully, and followed the path to the creek’s edge.

  Where the ground was muddy. Rich, black mud, easily tracked into a house.

  He checked for alligators before he went any farther. In Miami, it wasn’t smart to ignore the possibility that gators might be lurking inside any body of water, mostly submerged, just their nostrils and eyes floating above the surface. He had seen them in residential swimming pools, streams, swamps, golf course water hazards, once even in the fleeting pond made by a broken hydrant.

  On
the other side of the creek was a similar line of trees and brush, then another yard and another house. That one was smaller, almost entirely engulfed by trees and tall growth, like a rustic fishing cabin. He could see only glimpses of the road that led to the little house, just enough to tell that it was dirt, and rarely traveled.

  Which might make it a good hideout.

  He thought about calling Calleigh but didn’t want to disturb her for nothing. He’d just have a quick look at the place. If Lyall was there—simply relocated by hauling some of his stuff across the creek—he should be able to tell easily enough, and then he could go back and get Calleigh and call for backup.

  Still, he wouldn’t take any stupid chances. Just in case, he drew his service weapon and continued forward cautiously, gaze shifting between the windows that faced the rear of the cabin. He didn’t see anyone appear at either of them, no shadows or shifting reflections.

  When Eric reached the cabin he pressed himself against the rough wood-sided wall and slowly, carefully approached the nearest window. It had a crude curtain, really just what looked like a piece of a sheet nailed or stapled above the window, but it was pulled aside and Eric could see a cluttered room, with cardboard boxes and plastic garbage bags stacked on and around the cheap furniture. It looked like someone had moved in quickly and hadn’t taken the time to unpack.

  Maybe from the house across the creek.

  He risked a longer, more thorough look. The floor was wood, with the passageway between the room he could see into and what must have been a hallway worn in the center by years of foot traffic.

  In the smooth spot Eric could see mud, like the mud from inside Douglas’s house.

  Has to be him. He didn’t go far, just grabbed the stuff he thought he’d need and hauled it back here. Maybe he didn’t think we’d bother searching the neighborhood—who would assume that someone wanted for murder would hide out right behind his address of record?