Right to Die

by Jeff Mariotte

  He didn’t think the bomber would have been able to plant anything in the library, since Carmen Ibanez had clearly been there for some time sipping coffee and reading.

  That only left the entire rest of the house, which had somewhere north of five thousand square feet of floor space and a layout only slightly less confusing than the schematics for a space shuttle.

  From what Asher had said—and from his own limited experience of the Baby Boomer—the man would be most likely to plant his device near Carmen’s bedroom. She was the target, not her staff. He should have had Jesus show him where her bedroom was, but he didn’t want any extraneous bystanders in the house an instant longer than absolutely necessary.

  The house had two stories, and he was sure the main bedroom would be upstairs, so that narrowed things down. Gun in hand, Horatio crossed from room to room, kitchen to formal dining room to living room to home theater, until he found a staircase that wound up. He climbed carefully, making sure to keep his SIG Sauer at eye level as he ascended in case the Boomer was waiting for him.

  At the top, the stairs fed into a kind of star-shaped foyer, with hallways branching off in three different directions. Horatio listened but heard nothing except bird sounds and the distant rumble of a car on a roadway. The floor here was thickly carpeted, but the passage of many feet had crushed the pile enough so that there was no way of telling which hall had been traveled most recently.

  He decided to try the one that led to the east. Since the landscaping had clearly been designed to limit sun from the western exposure, he doubted if the master suite would face the west. More likely, it would look east, toward the sunrise and the ocean.

  He glanced into each room as he passed, turning doorknobs silently, opening them only far enough to determine if they appeared to be a master bedroom.

  The third door was the one.

  And when he opened that door, a flash of movement inside convinced him that he’d made the right choice.

  “Police!” Horatio shouted. “Freeze!”

  The person who had been in the room, squatting near the big four-poster bed, darted through another doorway. As he went, he whipped a handgun out and fired a wild shot that slammed into the wall near the doorjamb. Too close for comfort, considering he had taken no time to aim. Horatio squeezed off a shot in return, but the target was gone by the time his round plowed into the far wall.

  All Horatio had seen was a dark blur, with no distinguishing characteristics at all. He thought it was an adult male, but that was really more of a sensory impression than any kind of certainty.

  “I’m coming in,” Horatio said. “I’m armed, and there are more officers outside. You’re trapped, so it’s time for you to surrender before someone gets hurt.”

  The man inside didn’t respond. Horatio walked far enough into the bedroom to see that the intruder had ducked into a dressing alcove as big as Horatio’s entire office back at the crime lab. Luxurious women’s clothing hung everywhere, along the walls and from floor racks, and a dressing table with an illuminated mirror sat against one wall.

  But he couldn’t see the man who had run this way. He checked below the hanging clothes, looking for legs. His heart pounded, but the weapon was steady in his hand.

  With another step closer, he could see that the alcove led into a bathroom, full of gleaming tile and gold fixtures. Firing a shot in there would risk ricochets, but he would do it if he had to. He just had to make sure he didn’t miss.

  He had taken two steps into the dressing alcove when the bomb went off.

  Horatio heard the click of the detonator, even realized what it was, but that realization was simultaneous with the blast. A ball of bright white light with a fiery core flashed in front of his face. A pressure wave hit him an instant before the heat and knocked him backward, stunning him. The sound slammed into him at the same time as the heat wave, but the worst of the heat scorched the air above him, and he was already rolling away, pressing his face against the plush carpet, turning it away from the burst of flame. Debris rained down on his back.

  Although he knew in what order the various effects of the blast reached him, in the moment it came all at once, pressure and heat and noise, and it felt like someone had shoved a lit firecracker in his mouth, like it was all happening inside his head and outside at the same instant.

  When the rain of plaster and fabric and debris had settled, Horatio rolled again. His muscles seemed to work, his bones weren’t broken. Blood trickled from ears (the ringing in them so loud he wasn’t sure if he could hear anything, until he snapped his fingers as a test; that he heard, but far away, as if he were underwater with his hand above the surface) and his nose.

  Blinking away the slivers of light burned into his retinas, Horatio found his gun, a couple of feet away from where he had landed. The bomber had apparently fled the scene, or at least had not taken advantage of Horatio’s defenseless state. Maybe he thought his bomb had done the trick.

  A small fire blazed in the closet, some of Carmen’s clothing having been ignited by the blast. Horatio kicked the clothes to the floor, yanked a duvet off the big bed, and threw it over the flames, stomping on it until he was sure they were out. Then he stepped over the mess and into the bathroom, his weapon at the ready in case the bomber had taken refuge in the tub.

  A glass shower enclosure was cracked and the bomb had left scorch marks on the white tile floor, but otherwise the room was clear. Another door, wide open, led out into a hallway. Horatio passed through it. Outside, he heard a car engine abruptly catch, and he raced to a window just in time to see a dark green sedan speeding away on the street behind the property. Through the trees he couldn’t identify the driver or even the make of the car.

  He was back in the bedroom, looking for a secondary device, when he heard someone on the stairs.

  “Horatio!” Ryan sounded almost panicked.

  “I’m fine, Ryan,” he said. “I’m in the bedroom.”

  “Keep talking,” Ryan said. “This house is like a maze.”

  “You’re almost here,” Horatio said. A moment later, Ryan appeared. When he saw Horatio, the relief was clear on his face.

  “Are you okay? I heard—”

  “We traded shots, and there was a small detonation,” Horatio said. “Not enough to kill me, maybe even just a blasting cap or a little flash-bang. Here”—he pointed a small Maglite at a black box on the floor beneath the head of Carmen Ibanez’s bed, about eight inches long, four wide, and three tall—“is the real bomb.”

  “Is it live?”

  “It is. That’s why I wanted everyone out of the house. Including you.”

  “Can you disarm it?”

  “I might be able to,” Horatio said. “Then again, opening the casing might set it off. Our man usually uses timers, but ‘usually’ isn’t the same as always, and we don’t know that he hasn’t set a backup detonator that’s triggered by vibration. We’ll let the bomb squad render it safe remotely.”

  “Is there time?”

  “The bomb that caught me was a quickie, and tiny,” Horatio said. “More sound and fury than actual destructive power. I suspect it was something he had handy, that he could detonate on the run, meant to be a distraction if he needed one. If he could have detonated the big one remotely, he would have, since he knew that once the little bomb went off, even if it killed me, someone else would find the real one before Mrs. Ibanez slept here again. So the real bomb is on a timer, and there’s no remote override. And it’s set to detonate late tonight, when there’s the best certainty that she would be asleep in bed.”

  “You’re bleeding, though, H. You should get to a hospital, get checked out.”

  “I’m fine,” Horatio said again. “Let’s get out of here and get the bomb squad rolling.”

  23

  AFTER A RADIO CAR took Lyall Douglas to be booked, Calleigh and Eric were left standing on the dirt road that led to Douglas’s cabin hideout. “You think we’ve been processing the wrong scene?” Eric ask
ed.

  “I’m not sure there’s any such thing,” Calleigh said. “There are scenes that are helpful and scenes that aren’t, but you don’t know which is which until you look.”

  “Good point.”

  “I wasn’t finding much of interest in his house, though. If you think we should have a look inside the cabin, I’m game.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Eric said. “If he moved over here because he had killed Wendy Greenfield and didn’t want to be found—”

  “In which case, he might have wanted to move farther away,” Calleigh interrupted.

  “No one ever said he was a genius.”

  “Most criminals aren’t.”

  “Anyway,” Eric went on, “he probably would have taken anything incriminating with him, or dumped it. There might be transfer from Wendy Greenfield at the house, but anything like bloodstained clothes would have been moved.”

  “That’s probably true, Eric. I left my kit back at the house, and I believe you did too.”

  “With my common sense inside,” Eric said. One of the things she liked about him was that he was willing to admit to making mistakes. Sometimes it took a while for him to see them as mistakes, but once he did he wasn’t reluctant to acknowledge them.

  “You were following the evidence,” she said, letting him off the hook to some extent. “The mud pointed to the creek, and the creek pointed to the cabin. You just should have let me know before you followed the trail all the way to the cabin.”

  “You’re right,” Eric said. He tossed her a smile that let her know that he knew she was dressing him down, but doing it in her patented Duquesne fashion. She supposed it came from growing up with an alcoholic father who she loved dearly—she had plenty of practice expressing disapproval of her dad’s actions without attacking his character, and she employed the same technique with the members of her CSI “family.”

  “Let’s get our kits, then,” she suggested, “and see what’s inside that cabin.”

  As Eric had observed through the window, the cabin was a disorganized mess. Douglas had apparently hauled his things over from the house and dropped them wherever he could, but had not had time to go back through and put them away. He was a haphazard packer, too; one box Eric opened contained kitchenware, plates and mugs and silverware, none of it wrapped or separated (and most of it, as a consequence, chipped or shattered) and on top of it he had packed tools, a hammer and some pliers, wrenches and screwdrivers. On top of those he had added a layer of underwear, which might have served to protect the dishes if he had put it between them and the tools.

  Douglas hadn’t moved much into the cabin, but it was tiny and couldn’t hold much anyway. It appeared to have already been furnished, in a manner of speaking. There were a couple of folding chairs and a card table in the main room, a TV set, a single floor lamp, and boxes. One end of this room was the kitchen, consisting of a sink, a small refrigerator, and a wooden counter that held a two-burner hot plate and a toaster oven. A bare lightbulb was mounted above the sink. The other room was a bedroom with a bathroom separated from it by a thin curtain, and it contained a twin bed, another lamp, and more boxes. The place smelled dusty and close, like it had been empty for a long time and Douglas hadn’t had a chance to air it out.

  “We should clear a path,” Calleigh said when they went in the front door.

  “I agree,” Eric said. Clearing a path was important at any scene, because otherwise evidence could stick to an investigator’s shoes and be walked right out of the case. With a cleared path, everybody knew what they were stepping on, and if anything was tracked into the path its origin could be retraced. “But to what?” There was no system at all to the placement of the boxes, and some of them had had things pulled out and set aside, which meant any path would include stepping over some of Douglas’s things. And there had been no particular crime committed here, so it wasn’t like they needed a path to a specific point. They needed to look at everything.

  “You’re right,” Calleigh said. “Let’s just get started, and be careful where we step.”

  “I can start in the back room,” Eric suggested, “and we can work toward each other.”

  “Works for me.”

  Stepping carefully, checking the floor before he set either foot down, Eric worked his way through the mess into the cabin’s bedroom. He could almost stretch his hands from wall to wall; for sure, if he tried to lie down, his head and feet would touch them. The other direction, the way the bed was arranged, there was a little more space—almost two feet separated the foot of the bed from the curtain that delineated the bathroom.

  He started with the piles of dirty clothes on the floor. Keeping in mind the image he had seen of Lyall Douglas at the crime scene, in what looked like a solid color short-sleeved shirt and faded jeans, he picked up each item of clothing, one at a time. He scanned each one for suspicious stains, compared it to his mental image of what Douglas had been wearing that day, and looked for anything else out of the ordinary, including checking every pocket he came across. He found plenty of pocket lint, a few coins, a pebble, and a single rusted key, but nothing genuinely helpful. It’s like checking the pockets of an eight-year-old, he thought.

  When Eric had finished with the clothes on the floor, he turned to the boxes. There were three of them in a stack beside the bed. Eric folded back the flaps of the top one and saw yet more clothes. From the smell that wafted out, these were dirty too. Maybe he had been seeing Wendy because she had money, and he preferred buying new clothes to washing his old ones. As Calleigh had noted, there hadn’t been a washing machine at his house, and this cabin barely had space for a washboard to use at the creek.

  “Eric!” Calleigh’s shout held undeniable urgency, and Eric grabbed his weapon as he rushed back out to the living room.

  “What is it?”

  “I think I might have found our murder weapon,” she said. She stood in the kitchen area, behind the wooden counter. “In the drawer here.”

  He came around beside her. “Let’s see.”

  She trained her Maglite on a folding knife, in a drawer full of kitchen utensils that could have been purchased at a thrift shop. Most looked like they had been new sometime in the seventies. The knife was newer, resting on top of the other utensils like it had been dropped in recently.

  “That’s not exactly a kitchen knife,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “And it’s got a six-inch blade on it. Not a Boy Scout knife, either.” She put the flashlight down and took a camera from her kit, photographing the knife where it lay in the drawer.

  “Any blood on it?” Eric asked.

  “Let’s find out.” With her latex-covered fingers, she tore loose a paper towel from a roll and put it flat on the counter, then plucked the knife from the drawer and set it on the towel. She opened the blade partway, revealing a dark patch of something crusted near its back, where it would be hidden with the blade either fully open or fully closed.

  “Looks like maybe.”

  Eric reached into his crime scene kit, and found a small spray bottle of Luminol. He stopped himself, though. Luminol was handy and easy to use—a simple spritz on the questioned surface, and they could turn off the light. If the dark stuff was blood, it would glow a bright blue-green color.

  On the other hand, it also might react to copper or iron compounds, and other substances. It could also cause the loss of certain genetic markers, which might make the identification of the blood donor more difficult. And it could cause the blood to run and obscure any potential prints on the knife, although he couldn’t see any now. He had to train himself not to grab for it every time just because it was easy.

  Instead, he brought out a sterile swab, a tube of Hemastix Reagent strips, and a small bottle of distilled water. Opening the water, he used a drop to moisten the end of the swab. As Calleigh put away her camera, he touched the swab to the dark spot on the blade, just brushing the edge of it and leaving most of the substance undisturbed for later analy
sis back at the lab.

  Calleigh opened the bottle of Hemastix strips, which contained tetramethylbenzidine, or TMB, a chemical that reacted to the presence of blood by changing color, and removed one. She held it out for him, smiling like she was handing him a gift, and he applied the swab gently to the end of the strip, rolling it to be sure any transfer from the knife blade came into contact with it.

  Sure enough, the strip’s treated end turned blue-green immediately.

  “We’ve got blood,” Calleigh said. “No way to know until we get it to the lab if it’s human. But my guess is that we’ll find out that it is, and that it belongs to Wendy Greenfield.”

  “I’d like that,” Eric said. “Be good to get this one wrapped up tight.”

  “Maybe no one told Lyall that it’s hard to wash all the blood off any surface,” Calleigh said. “Without using chlorine bleach, he was bound to leave traces.”

  Eric looked over the kitchen as he put the knife into a paper evidence envelope. The floor was dirty, the appliances covered with a film of grime. “He’s not the world’s biggest slob, but he hasn’t had a chance to clean up this place. I figure he eats out most of the time, and that’s probably for the best.”

  Calleigh nodded her agreement. “Let’s finish up here, Eric. This place is making me lose my appetite.”

  24

  ESTEBAN IBANEZ’S ADDRESS wasn’t in Bal Harbour like his mother’s, but that didn’t mean it was in a poor neighborhood. He owned a condo on the twelfth floor of a building on Bay Avenue, with a view that looked back across Biscayne Bay toward the Miami skyline. When he opened the door and let Horatio in, the sun was lowering in the western sky, framed in a floor-to-ceiling window that silhouetted the young man’s form.

  “Esteban Ibanez?” Horatio asked.

  “That’s right.”

  Horatio’s ears still rang like he carried a hive full of angry bees around in his mouth, and he had to strain to hear Esteban’s soft voice. He had taken a quick shower and changed clothes, putting on a soft blue-and-white-striped silk shirt with a navy suit, but he had refused all suggestions that he seek medical attention. There might be time for that later, but not yet. “I’m Lieutenant Horatio Caine, with the Miami-Dade Crime Lab,” he said. “I’ve just paid a visit to your mother’s house. Someone planted a bomb there today.”