Right to Die

by Jeff Mariotte

  “What, Frank?”

  “Right here. Senator Sandra Davison is making a speech tonight at the Sandmoor House.”

  “Nice venue,” Horatio said, picturing the trendy South Beach hotel. “She’s the senator from Maryland?”

  “That’s right,” Frank said. He put the paper down on Horatio’s desk and pawed through the copies of court documents and news accounts of the trial. “But look here.” He pushed a clipping toward Horatio. “She’s also the senator who was the tie-breaking vote that kept the full Senate from debating the Ibanez case. She gave an impassioned speech about the family’s right to privacy and Hector Ibanez’s right to die with dignity, and it says she’s more responsible than anyone else for sending the case back to the Florida Supreme Court.”

  “Which had already ruled in favor of Carmen Ibanez,” Horatio remembered. “And the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. So unless Congress could change the law in time, that decision sealed Hector Ibanez’s fate.”

  “That’s how I read it.”

  “Why is she speaking in Miami?”

  “Testing the waters’d be my guess. She keeps being mentioned as a dark horse presidential candidate. Hard to win the presidency without Florida, so she’s probably down here raising money and tryin’ to gauge her support. The article said it’ll be her sixth trip to the state in the past six months, so if I was a betting man, I’d put my money on it.”

  “You’re not a betting man, Frank?” Horatio asked.

  “Not on politics. You can’t trust those people to do anything that makes sense. At least in a horse race you know someone’s gonna win.”

  Horatio steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them for a moment. “Her speech is at seven?”

  “What it says here.”

  “And it’s already after six. I think, Frank, that it would be a good idea to evacuate that hotel.”

  “Horatio, that’s—”

  “I know it’s a tall order. And the hotel’s owner or manager will complain loudly. But would we rather deal with some complaining or see a United States senator and possibly several hundred hotel guests get blown up?”

  Frank studied Horatio closely. “You think this is going to be a big one.”

  “His biggest, I’d guess. We’re not talking about a private home or a small clinic here, Frank. We’re talking about a ballroom at a major hotel, and a United States senator. Asher is raising the stakes, and he’ll have to back his raise with a big boom.”

  “You’re right, Horatio,” Frank said, nodding his agreement. “I’ll make the call.”

  “You do that. I’ll gather my team and we’ll meet you over there. With a bomb squad and as many officers as you can spare. It’s going to be a mess.”

  The scene was, as predicted, a mess.

  Ocean Drive, the main street running along the Atlantic side of South Beach, saw heavy traffic at the best of times. Now, traffic was virtually at a standstill, because Ocean was partially blocked by emergency vehicles, police officers setting up a perimeter, and the hundreds and hundreds of people who had been forced out of the hotel—guests and those who had already arrived for Senator Davison’s speech.

  Horatio parked the Hummer on the beach a quarter mile away, and Eric, driving a second one, did the same. They all gathered their equipment and jogged up the beach, then cut over toward the Sandmoor House. The hotel looked like some kind of alien spacecraft that had touched down, coated in coral, and painted pastel pink with green trim. Not a lovely place, Horatio thought, but it was devoutly modern inside and attracted its share of the beautiful people, even while maintaining its old Miami clientele. Somehow the combination drew unexpected events like the senator’s speech.

  The perimeter had been set at five hundred feet from the building. A command trailer had already been put into place in Lummus Park, on the narrow green strip just before the sand started, and Horatio headed there first. While the team waited outside, he identified himself to the uni at the door and went in. Taking in the people gathered around a small conference table at a glance, he introduced himself for those he didn’t know. “I’m Lieutenant Horatio Caine of the Miami-Dade Crime Lab,” he said.

  A bespectacled woman with spiky black hair, wearing a silk pin-striped business suit with no blouse beneath it—or anything else that Horatio could determine—glared at him. “You’re the Caine who’s responsible for my hotel being empty?”

  “If you’re talking about the Sandmoor House, ma’am.”

  “I am. I’m Janice Garrison, the manager. And I have a very significant event scheduled in twenty-five minutes.”

  “I’m aware of that, Ms. Garrison. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience. Did they tell you the reason for the evacuation?”

  A police captain named Moe Trafford spoke up. “Of course we did, Horatio. I made very certain that Ms. Garrison understands the seriousness of the threat.”

  “It all sounds a little hypothetical to me,” the hotel manager insisted. “We were just talking about it. Captain Trafford says this person normally attacks abortion providers, but now he’s started attacking lawyers and judges. How does any of that translate to hotels?”

  “It’s not the hotel he’s after, Ms. Garrison,” Horatio replied. “It’s the senator.”

  “We’re not any happier about this than Janice is.” The new speaker was a young man in a crisp gray suit. His tie had threads of silver in it, and his blue eyes were large and very sincere.

  “And you are…?”

  “Peter Dalton, of Senator Davison’s staff. She’s got a major speech scheduled in just a few minutes. There’s an audience of several hundred people out there who had their expensive fund-raising dinner interrupted. Since you kicked us out of the hotel, do you have any suggestions as to where we might want to hold it?”

  “My suggestion would be to reschedule it for a time when the senator’s life isn’t in danger,” Horatio said. “Was the senator in the hotel earlier?”

  “She has a suite there,” Dalton replied. “She got in this afternoon, and would have spent the night after the speech. She’s got a flight to Iowa in the morning.”

  “And where is she now?”

  “We put her in a suite at another hotel, up the block,” Dalton said. “For security reasons, we’re not telling anyone where she is.”

  “That’s probably for the best,” Horatio said. “As long as you’ve got some officers there with her.”

  “She’s in good hands,” Captain Trafford assured him. Horatio trusted the captain’s judgment. South Beach was his turf, and if he had responsibility for Senator Davison’s safety, that was fine with Horatio.

  He was about to respond when Frank Tripp banged through the door, looking like he wished he had never gotten out of bed this morning. “Still no sign of Asher,” he reported. “He’s driving a rental car with a GPS unit, which we found parked over on Collins, couple blocks down from here. It’s empty, not so much as a gum wrapper that I could see. We tried to track the GPS in his mobile phone, but he’s got it turned off. Probably ditched it anyway. I get the feeling he knows we’re on to him.”

  “Which would make tonight his last stand,” Horatio said. “And he’ll want to go out with a bang. We’ll clear the hotel as quickly as we can, but I’m afraid there won’t be any speeches made there tonight.” He caught Jorge Ortiz’s eye. “Are your people ready, Jorge?”

  “We were born ready, Horatio.”

  At the moment, Horatio felt that entering a building containing a large explosive device might be easier than dealing with angry bureaucrats.

  “Let’s do it, then.”

  Ortiz grabbed his helmet from the floor beneath the table and stuck it on his head. As he rose, he tightened his chin strap. “Right behind you, brother.”

  The Sandmoor House had eighty rooms on nine floors. On the ground floor were the lobby, offices, a bellman’s closet, a gift shop, and a café. Up a wide staircase were the meeting rooms and the ballroom where Senator Davison had be
en scheduled to speak. The ballroom had been decorated with red, white, and blue bunting—traditional, although not inspired. A raised dais held a few chairs and a podium, and behind it the flags of the United States, Florida, and Maryland had been arranged. The neatly ordered tables and chairs skewed, dinner half served, were indications of how quickly the room had emptied.

  It would take a lot of hands to check the whole place, so Horatio and his team joined the bomb squad officers. Horatio carried a VaporTracer, a handheld ion mobility spectrometer that looked a little like a DustBuster. It, too, sucked in air, but much more slowly and in significantly smaller quantities. In this case, electrons interacted with the incoming molecules, turning them into positive or negative ions. Explosives formed negative ions, which were drawn through a drift chamber and toward a metal detector plate. The time it took specific ions to drift to the plate helped to identify their components, and a plot of ion current versus drift time created an IMS spectrum that could identify different substances.

  To maximize the chance of finding traces of RDX, the base chemical of the C-4 that Asher used, the team employed different technologies, so that if one failed, another might succeed. Ryan and Calleigh’s devices, handheld Raman spectrometers, used lasers to achieve the same result as the VaporTracer. Eric had an electron capture detector with a gas chromatograph mounted on the front.

  While the bomb squad officers spread out, some going upstairs to start checking the senator’s suite and the guest rooms on the third floor, others remaining on the ground floor, the CSI team took the second floor, with its warren of meeting rooms and the big ballroom.

  They moved slowly, carefully testing the air from step to step, particularly in places they couldn’t see into well. Explosives released vapors, and anyone who had handled RDX would likely leave trace amounts of it on anything he touched.

  Waving his device beneath the dais, Horatio got a positive reading for RDX. “I’ve got something here,” he reported, flicking on his Maglite and pushing aside the bunting that draped the floor. With the light, he illuminated a wad of putty-colored material stuck to the bottom of the temporary stage. Copper wires coiled out of the putty to a small sealed box, no doubt a timer, attached beside it. Asher hadn’t even bothered with a casing for this one, but there was enough C-4 there to blow anyone on the dais through the ceiling.

  “A lot of it,” he said, reaching for his phone to call Jorge Ortiz.

  “I’m getting a reading here too,” Calleigh said. She was scanning a doorway at the side of the room, which Horatio guessed led into a service hallway.

  “We’d better—” he started, but Ortiz’s voice on the phone interrupted him.

  “Horatio, we’ve located three devices down here already,” he said. “This guy wasn’t taking any chances.”

  “No,” Horatio agreed. “He wasn’t. Jorge, we’ve got to get everyone out of this building. Now!”

  30

  HORATIO, CALLEIGH, ERIC, and Ryan raced down the wide carpeted steps, their crime scene kits banging against their legs, their flight made more awkward still by the explosives detectors they also carried. Nobody spoke—they all understood the gravity of the situation, and their mad dash was accompanied only by grunts of effort and the thunder of their footsteps.

  On the ground floor, bomb squad officers were already making for the doors. Pounding footsteps echoed from open stairwell doors, as the officers who had started their search on the third floor descended.

  Passing out of the hotel’s climate-controlled interior, Horatio felt the familiar slap of Miami humidity. He kept going, across the cleared roadway and toward the beach, making sure only that his team ran ahead of him. They couldn’t afford for anyone to stumble or trip. Horatio had been right about Asher’s plan for tonight, but he had also been wrong. He wasn’t just after the senator—he wanted to make a statement that would never be forgotten.

  The first of the bombs exploded just as Horatio’s feet hit sand. He dropped what he carried, reached out with both hands, and caught Calleigh and Ryan on the back and shoulder, pushing them forward. The three of them sprawled headlong to the ground, Eric close behind.

  Horatio heard a series of tremendous booming sounds, felt shock waves sweep across him like ripples from stones thrown not quite simultaneously into a pond, then another wave of intense heat. Shadows strobed in the successive flashes of light. Glass and chunks of the corallike coating of the exterior walls pattered down around him like giant hailstones. “Everyone okay?” he shouted when the punishing rain slackened.

  “I’m good,” Calleigh said.

  “Fine, H,” Eric offered.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “I’m cool.”

  Horatio gained his feet and turned back to look at the building. Asher had timed his devices perfectly. He hadn’t had the time or resources to completely destroy the hotel, and that had not been his intention. But he had done plenty of damage.

  The bombs on the third floor—and possibly higher, only a careful processing of the ruins would reveal that—had gone off slightly before the ones on the ground floor. Those in and around the second-floor ballroom were delayed another second or so. The result was that when the blasts below weakened the building’s structural integrity, the upper floors were already beginning to cave toward the ground floor. If Sandra Davison had been on the second floor, she would have been caught in the middle, with just enough time for terror to set in, and then she and much of her audience would have been killed, either by the blast, by the weight of the floors above dropping down, or by the fall into the inferno waiting below.

  Flames lapped out of the windows and thick black smoke roiled into the air. The crowd of onlookers had screamed at the explosions, and now that they were finished the noise level from their excited chatter seemed almost as loud as the blasts themselves. Firefighters rushed into action, uncoiling hoses and training the flow of water through doors and windows.

  Apparently the perimeter had been sufficient to prevent most injuries. Horatio could see a few people who had been cut by flying glass or debris, and paramedics were already fanning through the crowd to treat them. None seemed seriously hurt, which he was pleased to note.

  He wondered if Wendell Asher was in the crowd somewhere.

  Probably not, he guessed. Asher was too smart for that; he would know that there would be too many eyes looking for him.

  “Are you all right, Horatio?” Calleigh asked.

  He hadn’t stopped to consider. His ears still rang from his earlier encounter with Asher, but he didn’t think there was any long-term damage from either. That luck couldn’t hold indefinitely, though. He needed to find the rogue agent and put an end to his bombing career. “I’m fine, Calleigh, thanks. I’m just wondering where Asher is.”

  “He could be halfway to Orlando by now,” she said.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think his ego would let him leave so soon. Bombers and arsonists like to see the results of their handiwork. And he knows we’re on to him, but he’ll also want to know who he killed, if anyone. If not—if he knows he missed the senator and us—he’ll want to try again somehow.”

  She scanned the crowd, as he had done just moments before. “Do you think he’s here?”

  “He hasn’t stayed on the loose this long by taking unnecessary chances, has he? But he’s not far away. Holed up somewhere safe until he knows if he’s finished here or not.” He nodded his head toward the news vans beaming images into the sky.

  “Probably watching all this on TV.”

  “From a hotel room?”

  “If I had to guess. But we can’t discount the possibility that he’s killed someone and is using their condo or house, either. He’s certainly proven his willingness to kill for the sake of convenience.”

  “Like the gardener,” Ryan said, joining the conversation.

  “The gardener, and Silvio Castaneda, just so he could get a fresh gun. Who knows how many others over the years he has supposedly been chasing himself?”

/>   “We’ve gotta find this guy,” Ryan said.

  “We will, Mister Wolfe. And we’ll do it right now.” He fished out his phone—thankfully not broken by his dive into the sand—and called Frank Tripp. “Frank, I think Asher is somewhere close by. A hotel room, a condo, someplace like that, watching all the commotion out a window or on TV. We need to fan out with sniffers, canine units, whatever we’ve got available. Asher handled a significant quantity of C-4 today, so he’ll have residue on his hands and clothes.”

  “I’ll get on it,” Frank promised.

  “Okay. We’re on our way now too.”

  He closed the phone and looked at Calleigh, Ryan, and Eric. “All set?”

  “Let’s do it,” Eric said. “I really want to nail this guy.”

  “That, sir,” Horatio said, “makes two of us.”

  Dogs could be trained to sniff out nine different types of explosives, including RDX. They could maneuver almost anywhere, cover large swaths of territory, and follow a faint scent all the way to its source. As sophisticated as the handheld “sniffers” Horatio and his team used were, they would never be as efficient over large areas as trained canines. The only thing the dogs couldn’t do was tell their handlers which type of explosive material they had scented. Right now, Horatio would happily work within that limitation.

  The dogs, mostly German shepherds, muscular and alert, spread out with their handlers in tow, sniffing the air. They knew their task and set to it with apparent enthusiasm.

  Horatio and his CSIs couldn’t cover ground nearly as fast. Their mechanical devices needed time to test the air molecules, and although the machines worked quickly, they didn’t match the speed of a dog’s nose.

  So while the CSIs were still testing the doorways of the buildings closest to the Sandmoor House, the dogs had already moved down the block. Horatio’s phone rang and he answered immediately.