Dedication

To Mary Jane,

Who made me laugh

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by J.A. Kerley

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

“You’re beautiful, sweethearts! Brianna thanks you for coming tonight. And if you haven’t come yet, there’s always later!”

The performer blowing extravagant, double-handed kisses from the red-curtained stage would have been a stunning woman if she were a woman: large dark eyes with heavy lashes, delicate features, plump and roseate lips. Her hair was a wild, piled-high stack of scarlet, her gown built from chips of orange flame, sequins flashing as she kicked a long leg from the thigh-high slit, the slender ankle ending in a glittery, sling-back stiletto heel.

“You go, girl!” someone called, and the crowd roared approval as the sound system played the signature sign-off, Elton John’s “The Bitch is Back”. Brianna Cass – né Brian Caswell – winked to the crowd and ran caressing hands down the deep-cut décolletage of the gown to cup breasts built of neoprene foam. Her eyes widened in mock surprise.

“I think they love you! They’ve grown a full size tonight!”

Raw, raucous laughter and good-natured catcalls accompanied Brianna’s stage-step descent into an adoring crowd of gay men, the air a mix of alcohol, cologne and pot. Brianna flamboyantly sashayed to a large table beneath the stage. Someone handed her a Japanese fan, and she sat, fanning herself as laughing men clamored to buy her drinks.

“Hey, waiter. Hey!”

Alone at a tiny table in the corner of the shadowed club, Debro waved his hand to catch a server’s eye, but the waiter ignored him to take orders from a quartet of fortyish queens partying in a nearby booth. Debro’s table initially had three chairs, but he’d pushed two to another table. He had things to do and tablemates couldn’t be allowed.

The waiter took the queens’ orders and angled toward the bar.

“Hey, you,” Debro called. “Waiter!” Debro hated to yell – it garnered attention, which caused his invisibility to falter – but now that Brianna had finished her ridiculous, mocking act, he had to move fast.

“Waiter!”

The waiter looked toward Debro, sighed, walked over. “Yaas, do you need zomething?” he said in a faux accent, nose in the air. For a split second Debro imagined punching the man’s face and raping him on the floor of the nightclub. Instead, Debro nodded to Brianna, surrounded by well-wishers.

“What’s Brianna’s favorite drink?”

The twink gave Debro an appraiser’s stare, but Debro knew the waiter could only see himself in the wide mirroring lenses of his outsize sunglasses, the black knit hat pulled almost to the tops of the shades, a turtle-neck tee snugged beneath his chin. It helped make him invisible.

“Chom-pine,” the waiter said. “Brianna like z’chom-pine.”

“Champagne? What’s her favorite?”

“Z’most expensive, of courz. Creeesh-tal … Two-hondred-eighty dollars.” The waiter barely avoided sneering at Debro’s drink choice: Miller Lite beer.

“Bring me a bottle of the stuff,” Debro said, reaching for his wallet. “And one of those long champagne glasses.”

The server regarded Debro with new eyes. “A bottle of Creees-tal and a flute, zen?”

“Yeah, a flute. Whatever.”

The man bustled away and Debro shot a glance at Brianna, standing and waving at well-wishers before turning for the hall leading to the restroom. “Do you see the bitch, Brother?” Debro whispered into the darkness. “Will Brianna come home with us tonight?”

The waiter returned with the champagne and glass. “Do you vish me to pop z’cork?”

Debro nodded and the man unwrapped the wire and tugged the cork without success. “Goddamn things are impossible,” the man muttered in his real voice, Midwestern nasal, probably Ohio. Debro took the Cristal and his strong hands easily twisted the cork loose, wisps of vapor floating from the bottle. The waiter bowed and backed away, money in hand.

Sitting and sliding the table a foot deeper into the shadows, Debro reached into his jacket for his cell phone. Taped behind it was a tiny vial of amber liquid. His fingernails pried the cap from the vial and he tapped the phone above the flute as the vial emptied. Anyone looking his way saw only a man appearing to send a text.

Brianna re-entered the room, a half-dozen full glasses on her table, gifts from admirers. Her long red nails began doing an eenie-meenie-miney selection of what to drink first.

Time.

Debro took a deep breath and stood, snugging his collar higher and hat lower as he crossed the crowded room. Four young males were at Brianna’s table, but they took a single glance at Debro and turned away. Debro was not trendy. It was part of his invisibility.

The only eyes on Debro belonged to Brianna, her head cocked as if finding Debro a curious intrusion on her space. He pushed a false and adoring smile to his face, feigning embarrassment as he held the bottle and flute to his side.

“Great show,” Debro said. “You’re so nasty and fun. May I offer you a drink?”

“Is that champagne?” Brianna said. “Brianna loooves the bubbly.”

Debro displayed the label and Brianna trilled her delight. Debro poured, his hand hiding the amber viscosity at the bottom of the glass. The champagne mixed with the fluid and bubbled to the mouth of the flute.

“From a grateful admirer,” Debro said, handing Brianna the glass. She batted big eyes, emptied it in three seconds, then held the flute toward Debro to return it.

“Thank you, sweetcakes,” she said. “That was dee-double-licious.”

“I bought it for you,” Debro said, setting the champagne on the table. It had done its work.

“Aren’t you the darling boy,” Brianna chirped, crossing the long legs and pouring another glass. “Have we met before, sweet prince?”

But Debro was already moving away. He returned to the table in the shadows and stared at the drag queen drinking his champagne, a mean and insulting bitch who – like the two other nasty boys hallucinating on the floor of his home – was long overdue for punishment.

He checked his watch. All that remained was the waiting.

2
Ten days later

Call me, Jeremy, I thought, sitting on my deck on Florida’s Upper Matecumbe Key and pressing my fingers to my temples as my eyes squeezed shut with effort. Skype me. Text me. Write me. I opened my eyes and stared at the smartphone on the table beside my deck chair.

Nada.

My friend and former colleague, Clair Peltier, a pathologist in Mobile, Alabama, is as pure a scientist as ever conceived. Yet Clair believes in synchronicity, a metaphysical linkage of time and space and energy, where wishes, dreams, actions and events form alliances unfathomable to the human mind, but totally logical within the universal matrix. I’d spoken to her last night, explaining that a person close to me seemed to have vanished from the planet and I was worried.

“Think about the person, Carson. If they’re part of you they’ll feel it.”

“I have been, Clair.”

“Think harder.”

I looked up to see a fat white moon in a cobalt sky, low enough to be enhanced by the atmospheric lens, its light broken into diamonds atop waves shivering across the three-acre cove behind my home. It would be a beautiful night if I knew my brother was safe.

I’d not heard from Jeremy in seven weeks. Though I’d once gone a year without word from my brother, he was then twenty-five and in an institute for the criminally insane, imprisoned for the murders of five women and I, ashamed, didn’t visit the institution for twelve months. He’d also been belatedly indicted for killing our father, who he tied to a tree and disassembled with a kitchen knife; I had just turned ten at the time, Jeremy was sixteen.

Jeremy spent almost a decade in incarceration until the director of the institute, Dr Evangeline Prowse, broke every rule in her life and profession by sneaking Jeremy to New York. In a bizarre twist of fate – since those knowing Jeremy Ridgecliff was my brother were countable on one hand – I, Detective Carson Ryder, having a record of apprehending psychotics, was summoned to either catch him or kill him.

During the journey I discovered my brother’s role in the women’s murders was ambiguous, and not deserving of death or life-long incarceration, and I helped Jeremy elude the police, a breach of my professional oath that troubled my conscience to this day. Jeremy’s killing of our father likely saved my life, and troubled my conscience not the slightest.

After his disappearance in New York, I again had no contact with Jeremy for over a year, until he called from an isolated rural community in Eastern Kentucky, where he’d assumed the identity of a retired Canadian psychologist named Auguste Charpentier, living in a well-appointed cabin and growing wealthy using an unorthodox analysis of the stock market. Since he’d surfaced, we’d communicated enough that I knew something was amiss if he’d gone this long without acknowledging my calls, texts, and e-mails.

I also knew that nothing good had ever come of my brother spending too much time alone with his thoughts.

Call me, Jeremy, I thought, one final time, adding You thoughtless bastard.

The phone lay dead and I glanced at my watch; four minutes past midnight. I checked the beer bottle on the table beside my deck chair; empty. Both indicated it was time to totter to bed. I took another look at the moon and whistled. Mr Mix-up, my huge pooch, ran up from hunting crabs in the sandy backyard. I yawned and scratched his head and we headed inside.

As I latched the door my cell phone trilled the opening riff of Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom”. My heart paused mid-beat: Had I conjured up my wayward brother? I checked the screen and frowned – Roy McDermott, my boss at the Florida Center for Law Enforcement.

“Carson, it’s Roy,” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

Roy always identified himself, as though I could forget any voice attached to a ceaselessly grinning jack-o’-lantern face topped by a hay-bright shock of unruly hair, an untamable cowlick floating above like antennae.

“I’m sitting on the deck and enjoying the moon, Roy,” I semi-lied. “What’s going on?”

“Viv Morningstar just called. She was looking for you, but couldn’t find your number.”

Dr Vivian Morningstar was the Chief Forensic Pathologist for Florida’s southern region. We’d worked together several times and I’d found her as attractive as she was professional. I’d made a few attempts at flirtation, but her eyes had told me I was dancing in the wrong ballroom.

“What does the Doc want, Roy?”

“She’d like you to meet her at MD-Gen first thing in the a.m. It involves a poisoning.”

MD-Gen was Miami-Dade General Hospital, Dade being the county. A hospital – with its emphasis on the living – seemed a bit far afield for the forensic pathologist.

“She doesn’t want me at the morgue?”

A chuckle. “It’s Viv, Carson. She basically ordered me to send you to MD-Gen.”

Vivian Morningstar on a case was like Patton on the march … all ahead full, damn the bombs and bureaucrats. Her staff revered her, but tempered their love with terror.

“And you told her …?” I said.

“Only that I’d pass the message on. Say hello to the moon for me.”

3

I awoke an hour before my 6.00 a.m. alarm and jumped through the shower, pulling on jeans and a blue Oxford shirt, grabbing a coral linen jacket to keep the shoulder-holstered Glock from startling citizens at stop lights.

I went beneath my home, stilted to ride above storm surges, and climbed into a fully outfitted Land Rover Defender originally confiscated in a drug bust. Colleagues called me Sahib and Bwana, but having the only veldt-ready copmobile in the country, I laughed it off.

I turned on to Highway 1. An hour and two coffee stops later I entered Miami-Dade General and elevatored to a room in the Intensive Care section. Doc Morningstar was leaning against the wall and studying reports, her dark and shoulder-length hair fallen forward. She was slender and athletic and appeared taller than her five ten, the effect of improbably long legs currently hidden under khaki slacks. Her blouse was a silky purple, the sleeves rolled to her elbows, her only ornamentation a pair of small enameled earrings, purple coneflowers to match the blouse.

Morningstar glanced up, brushed back the errant hair, and nodded, any potential smile damped by the patient centering the room, a young man, late teens to early twenties, blond, with sunken and lifeless eyes and flesh so pale as to seem blue. A mask covered his nose and mouth, so many tubes and hoses running to the mask it appeared a mechanical octopus was clinging to his face.

I gave the doc a What’s-up? look.

“Name’s Dale Kemp,” she said quietly. “Hikers found him three days ago near the Pahayokee overlook in the Glades. He’s been raped, semen found, but nothing in the database.”

DNA sampling used to take weeks, but recent technology made it a matter of hours with one of the new machines, and we’d recently added one to our arsenal. But if there was no match for the perp in the database, it was still a dead end.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

Morningstar set aside the reports. Her eyes were huge and the kind of hazel that seems pale one moment, dark the next.

“An overdose seemed indicated, but nothing showed. The attending physician, Dr Philip Costa, knew I had a sub-specialty in toxicology and called yesterday. I suggested a more complex series of tests, initially thinking scopolamine or atropine, and my preliminary tests found a massive quantity of datura stramonium in his blood, among other things.”

“Datur-strama … what?”

“You might know its plant source: Jimson weed.”

My mental Rolodex whirred. “Also called Loco weed?”

She nodded. “I also found robitin, a phytotoxin from Robinia pseudocacia, or black locust tree. When it’s ingested by animals, they become stupefied, unable to recognize their surroundings. They often die.”

“Jeee-sus,” I said.

“There’s probably more in this crazy cocktail, Ryder. But the datura and robinia seem the main components.”

“What’s the effect of the Loco weed?”

“In controlled quantities, datura has medicinal uses. Larger doses create delirium and fearful hallucinations. It can result in odd behavior, such as stripping off clothes, picking at oneself, staring into space. A person dosed with datura can look in a mirror and see a complete stranger. Or a cow. Or nothing at all.”

Hallucinations atop stupefaction. “Where was he last seen, anyone know?”

“He was ID’d via Missing Persons at Miami-Dade PD. Last sighting was at a Miami Beach bar. He didn’t come to work the next day.”

“When’d he disappear?”

“Ten days ago. There’s something else I wanted to show you. Take a look at his back.”

We gently rolled Dale Kemp over. I saw bruises and scratches and an odd pattern between his shoulder blades: a pair of coupled circles etched into the skin, as if a tenpenny nail had been drawn across his flesh hard enough to welt, but not break, the skin. Two vertical lines fell below, the tops of the lines touching the ovoids. A horizontal line fell between the verticals.

“A figure eight,” I said. “On top of some lines.”

“Or, looking from below …”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “A freaking infinity symbol.”

We rolled him back. I looked between the kid and the readings on the monitor. “He’ll always be like this?” I asked. “It’s permanent?”

“There aren’t a lot of field trials to draw from, as you’d expect.” She nodded at an array of prepared syringes on the bedside table. “The robinia inhibits protein synthesis, so we’ve concocted a treatment to enhance reactions. It also contains physostigmine, an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor.”

“Uh …”

“Sorry. The first to reduce toxic effects of the black locust, the second helps reduce the hallucinations.”

I found it odd Morningstar used the word we’re and us, as if Kemp were her patient. The only course recommended for Morningstar’s standard “patients” was burial or cremation.

“Where could you get these plants, Doc?” I asked.

“Jimson weed grows wild across the country. Black locust grows in most states east of the Mississippi.”

I made a pouring motion. “What … someone just dumped twigs and leaves into a blender and made this stuff?”

“The active chemicals were likely extracted from the plant sources and concentrated. That would take a knowledge of chemistry. But probably basic.”

“As basic as jurisdictions?” I said, growing puzzled by Morningstar’s request that I be here. A rape, though horrific, was not reason to call me, the FCLE’s specialist in psychotics, sociopaths and other mental melt-downs.

“Jurisdictions?” she said.

“You said Kemp was found by Miami-Dade cops, was in their Missings file. Why did you call me, Doctor?”

Morningstar walked to the window and gazed down on the parking lot, forlorn in its dawn emptiness. Not only was I uncertain why I was here, I was also puzzled at her involvement. When she had solved the toxicology problem, her work was over, time to return to the dead. She seemed more like an attending physician than a pathologist.

Morningstar turned back to me. “I, uh … it’s not a typical case, is it, Detective? The combination of substances seems so calculated and cold that it feels … evil.”

Another anomaly. Evil was not a word normally used in the clinical halls of Morningstar’s pathology department. Had the bizarre methodology of the case unsettled the usually imperturbable pathologist?

“So you’d prefer the FCLE to investigate? Me in particular?”

“It’s your world, right, Detective? Who else but a psychopath might, uh …”

Words failed and she stared at the body motionless amidst the tubes and wires, his thoughts turned to nightmares and even the nightmares burned away, perhaps forever, by a combination of toxins you might find in your own backyard.

“Who else but a psychopath might turn common plants into Satan’s private date-rape drug?” I said.

Morningstar nodded. “I figured you’d have the right words.”

4

“You want to grab a case from Miami-Dade?” Roy McDermott said from behind his broad desk, patting down the straw-hued cowlick that immediately bounded back in defiance. “What? We don’t have enough cases of our own?” Outside his twenty-third-story window the Miami skyline was a study in muscular architecture. The FCLE was in the downtown Clark Center, and was the state’s top investigative agency, usually summoned when special expertise was needed. We stayed busy.

“Doc Morningstar thinks it’s the way to go.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, partner, but she’s a pathologist, not an investigative professional.”

“We can do it, right? Assert jurisdiction?”

Roy nodded reluctantly. “We’re state, they’re local. But it’s basically a missing-persons case that’ll probably get filed as a sex crime. I don’t see the reason, Carson. It’s not like we’re begging for work.”

My phone rang and I checked the caller: Morningstar. I made notes as she detailed her latest findings.

“That was the good Doc herself,” I said when we’d finished.

Roy clapped his hands in mock delight. “Goodie. Does she have any more cases to add to our list?”

“She has a newly isolated agent in the tox combo. Something called raphides. Given the plant-based nature of the other toxins, Morningstar thinks it came from dieffenbachia.”

“The houseplant? I used to have one in my office until it died. Probably had something to do with stubbing out cigars in the pot.”

“Dieffenbachia is also called dumb cane. Seems the raphides cause paralysis of the vocal cords.”

Roy spun to study the skyline. “So the perp drops this nastiness in a drink. The black locust makes the target head home with cramps and muscle weakness, the datura makes him hallucinate like Timothy Leary squared, and this last stuff …”

“Makes it impossible to call for help,” I said.

Roy turned back to his desk and picked up the phone.

“You’re tight with Vince Delmara, right?”

I nodded. Vince was a senior investigator with the Miami-Dade County Police Department. We’d worked together on my first case in Florida last year, and I’d found Delmara a first-rate detective, old school, the kind to visit a crime scene just to sniff the air. We’d hit it off from the git-go.

“Good,” Roy said. “Let Vince schmooze you through the transfer and it’ll go easy.”

“You think?”

He grinned. “Unless some honcho has a burr under his saddle, they’ll be delighted to pass the potato to us.”

My partner in most operations was Ziggy Gershwin. I gave him a call and was outside his Little Havana apartment minutes later, waiting until a slender man with coal-black hair pushed from the door, jamming a scarlet shirt into tan chinos, his cream jacket hanging across his shoulder, a rolled tortilla in his mouth like a cigar. An ancient woman was walking a tan puff of dog down the sidewalk and Gershwin’s cordovan boat shoes leapt over the bewildered canine, earning an icy glare from the woman. I filled him in as I drove, as much as I knew.

“Oy caramba, Big Ryde,” Gershwin said as he buttoned his cuffs. “That’s some crazy cocktail.”

A few months back Ziggy Gershwin would have been wearing threadbare jeans, a T-shirt advertising a beer brand, and orange skate shoes, but becoming an active agent in the FCLE had upped his fashion game. The product of a Jewish father and Cuban mother, his full name was Ignacio Ruben Manolo Gershwin, and he’d been Iggy as a child. But a teacher had started calling the hyperactive, darting kid Ziggy, and it stuck.

“Morningstar thinks Kemp received repeated and heavy doses of the tox mix, Zigs, maybe starting at a bar.”

“What, we’re doing legwork for Miami-Dade?”

“We’re appropriating the case. The Doc figures it’d take a psycho to sicken and weaken people, turn off their screams, then fill their head with hallucinations while he rapes them.”

“No matter how lovely Señorita Morningstar may be, isn’t she a pathologist and not a—”

“Heard it from Roy,” I said, cutting him off.

I called and found Vince at his desk in MD’s headquarters and said we’d be by in minutes. He had two words: Bring coffee. He meant real brew, not the stuff cooked up at cop houses across the land, desiccated brown crumbles boiled into a bitterness no sugar could blunt. We stopped at a bodega and filled my large Zogirushi with righteous espresso thunder and were at MD in minutes.

Vince Delmara was in a cluttered cubicle in the Homicide unit, his wingtips on his desk as he reviewed jai-alai scores in the Miami Herald. He looked up, saw us approaching, and folded the paper. Vince was medium height and slender and his dark complexion was marred with acne pocks, his black hair brushed straight back. His dark eyes were large and piercing and with his prize-sized proboscis Vince called to mind a thoughtful buzzard. He always dressed in dark suits, white shirts and neon-bright ties, capping the ensemble with a Dick Tracy-style fedora to enter the bright Miami sun, which he regarded with vampiric suspicion.

I poured his ceramic mug full of caffeine and Vince’s toucan-sized beak sniffed. He drank, leaned back his head, moaned, then, as if his day had been re-booted, set his eyes on Gershwin and me. “Jesus … too much Scotch last night. I’m surprised I didn’t wake up wearing a fucking kilt.”

“Your wife still make you stop and get a few pops before you come home?” Gershwin asked.

He nodded. “Says it makes me easier to live with.”

“She must have found you real easy to live with last night,” Gershwin said.

“Beatrice is in Tampa visiting her sister. I had to live with me last night.” He took another blast of java. “What can I do you gents for?”

“We’ve got a guy who was a Missing, Vince. He’d been drugged, kept for a week, then dumped. We’re planning to pull the case into our purview. Doc Morningstar thinks it’s a psycho at work.”

Vince gave me a raised eyebrow. “Last I noted, Carson, the gorgeous doc was a pathologist and—”

I sighed and raised my hand. Had everyone been handed the same libretto? “I know, Vince. But I figured you might smooth the way, politics-wise.”

He sucked coffee and thought. “Well … given that details are just getting clear, the case will transfer from Missing Persons to Sex Crimes, but I’ll bet it’s still officially in MP. Lemme see what Missing Persons has listed.” He sat at a blank screen, pecked the keys. Nothing happened.

“Works best when you turn it on, Vince,” Gershwin said. “Let me do the honors.”

Gershwin flipped the switch and seconds later we saw a photo of Dale Kemp in the corner of a screen of missing persons. His well-attended blond hair sparkled with highlights above sculpted cheekbones and penetrating gray eyes. His occupation was listed as medical-products salesman, and I figured his good looks created a buzz among the female staff when he entered a physician’s office.

Vince read the investigative report: “Moved here last April from Minneapolis. Liked to hit the beach and bars, but who doesn’t when they’re twenty-seven and in Miami.”

“Gay?” I asked.

“Yep, but you got to read between the lines. Lemme see who owns the case.”

Vince expanded the screen to the full report, tapped a bottom line. “The case is still in Missings, headed by Katey Beltrane, twenty years in the biz, eight in MP, and a pro. She’ll thank you for lightening her case load. Step in and snatch a case from an insecure pissant and you’ll—”

“Wind up in shit-fight corral,” Gershwin finished.

Vince tipped back the fedora and nodded at Gershwin. “For a young buck, you know a couple things. Let’s get it done so I can see how much I lost on jai-alai last night. Here’s a tip, never call your bookie when you’re smashed.”

5

We elevatored down to a wide hall, a sign above the first door saying MISSING PERSONS. Opening the door revealed a thirtyish guy with his feet propped on the desk and reading a Hustler magazine. He stood, six feet plus, heavy in the shoulders, with hair so blond it had to be dyed. He wore it long over his ears and down his neck. His face was oddly lopsided, and his nose slanted off to one side. He slipped the mag into a folder as if filing official business.

“Where’s Lieutenant Beltrane?” Vince asked.

“Getting her ass fixed,” the big guy said.

“What’s wrong with her ass?” Vince said. “I always liked it.”

“Beltrane busted her hip falling off a ladder. She’s got physical therapy for six weeks.”

The guy glanced at the clipped-on temp IDs Gershwin and I had received at the desk. He made no effort to extend a hand, so neither did I.

“I need to speak to whoever’s running the department,” Vince said.

Big boy crossed his arms and leaned the wall. Even with full sleeves I could see the guy had guns. “So start talking.”

“You’re heading the unit?”

The guy looked irritated at Vince’s emphasis. “I came here two months before the loot took the big dive. Smith retired two weeks later, Jalesco transferred to Bunco. I outranked the others, so when Beltrane hit the floor, I was in charge.”

Vince simply stared like the guy was a scotch-generated mirage, the first time I’d seen Vince at a loss for words. I stepped in, glancing at the nameplate: Det. Figueroa.

“Look, Detective Figueroa, given certain insights into the case by the pathologist, the FCLE has decided to put Dale Kemp’s case under our jurisdiction.”

The guy scowled. Delmara’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it, muttered “Got to take this. A snitch who usually pays off.” Vince hustled to the bathroom across the hall, an appropriate venue for talking to a snitch.

I turned back to Figueroa, who was squinting in thought. “Your jurisdiction?” he said.

I tried upbeat. “Look on the bright side, bud: one less hassle to deal with.”

“Fuck your bright side, mister. This is Miami-Dade, not a bunch of county clowns with cowshit on their boots. We can handle it.”

Upbeat wasn’t his preferred métier, so I tried making nice. “I mean no disrespect to your abilities, amigo, but our interest in the case stems from—”

“I read the report,” Figueroa interrupted. “It smells bogus. I’m not even sure it should be here.”

“The victim was drugged, abducted and raped,” I said, puzzled. “How’s that not a crime?”

Figueroa shook his head like I was a moron. “A couple hot boys meet up at a bar, go somewhere to hook up and do drugs. They get all sexed up and time don’t mean jackshit. Then one guy decides he’s tired of it. The other has a hissy fit, gets his butt-buddy all dopey and drops him in the Glades to teach him a lesson. Don’t say you haven’t seen it.”

I had encountered variations of Figueroa’s scenario, and had considered it in this case, but the drug combo wasn’t anything near recreational.

“You didn’t see the tox reports, Detective Figueroa. He’d had some nasty stuff.”

Rod Figueroa smirked, probably his default expression. “I’ve seen these dudes on Ecstasy, heroin, crank, ice, PCP, mushrooms, glue, cough syrup, paint thinner, and mixes of them all … what you got to beat that?”

I thought about explaining the calculated potency and effects of the mixture given Kemp, but it would have been like trying to open a twelve-foot stepladder in a room with an eight-foot ceiling. And anyway, I was tiring of Rod Figueroa.

“If it’s your opinion that this wasn’t a crime, Detective,” I said, ju-jitsuing him with his own words, “then we’ve taken nothing from you. If you could be so kind as to send us any files you have, I’ll be appreciative. Have a nice day.”

I set my card on his desk and backed away. I nodded at Gershwin and we spun and left the office. I heard the sound of tearing paper, but didn’t turn. We retreated down the hall and waited until Delmara appeared.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“Figueroa doesn’t seem cut out for the job, Vince, an obvious bias against gays. Most Missings cops I know are past that.”

“Figueroa’s an asshole. He comes by it naturally – his daddy’s an asshole, too. But a high-ranking asshole in MDPD, which is why junior’s got way too much pull for a guy barely thirty. Little Roddy was in Theft last I saw, but I guess Daddy wanted junior to get some Sex-Crimes cred on his way up.”

“Daddy is?”

“Captain Alphonse Figueroa. A guy who started on a beat in Little Havana and made all the right moves. Knew he was making ’em, too.”

“Political type?” I asked.

“Understudied with the old school macho types who ran the place a couple decades back. They pushed Figueroa upstairs, gave him a cushy desk in Community Relations. Daddy Figueroa’s a piece of work … I think he’s on his fifth wife. Unfortunately, he’s high-profile in the older Cuban community, one of the department’s PR assets. So junior gets a lot of sway.”

“What’s wrong with Figueroa’s face?” Gershwin asked. “Looks like someone scrunched it in a vise.”

Delmara shrugged. “Some kind of accident when he was a kid, running a jet ski while drunk, plowed into a boat. No one’s ever really said.”

“Figueroa’s moving up in the department?” I asked.

“Daddy says, ‘Maybe my sonny boy should get experience in the Missing Persons unit’ and you can hear the yessirs and pens filling out transfer forms.”

“The asshole’ll probably be Chief some day,” Gershwin muttered.

Delmara slapped a hand on my partner’s shoulder.

“You are indeed old beyond your years, Detective.”

Gershwin and I crossed Biscayne to Miami Beach, heading to the Stallion Lounge, the last place Dale Kemp had been seen. I figured it had to open early to air out from previous evenings, the smell of beer and bodies and a gazillion drenchings of cologne thick as fog in the semi-darkness. It was booths and a few tables, half of the floor set aside for dancing. The walls were dark wood with sconces for light. A mirrored ball hung from the ceiling.

I saw four guys in a back booth. Two were in full black leather regalia, like they were rehearsing for the Village People, the others resembled prep-school wannabes, clean-cut, white tees tucked into dark jeans. Loafers at the end of long and crossed legs. Except when they turned our way, their eyes looked a thousand years old.

A guy stood behind the long bar rinsing glasses, and I knew he’d made us from the moment our heels slapped the floor. He was inches over six feet and looked carved from a block of chocolate, pneumatic biceps rippling as he toweled the glassware, his chest broad and ripped under a blue denim vest that glittered with studwork.

We walked his way, but his eyes stayed on his drying. “You’re wasting your time,” he said in a sing-song voice that didn’t fit the physique. “We card everyone.”

He meant they asked for proof of age, though I figured a faux driver’s license printed on construction paper would pass muster.

“Good for you,” I said, pulling Kemp’s photo from my jacket. “But that’s not why we’re here. Know this guy?”

The bartender flipped the towel over a cannonball shoulder, took the shot and held it closer to the light. “Dale. He’s in here pretty regular, though I haven’t seen him in a few days.” The eyes got serious. “He all right?”

“We think he may have had his drink spiked. It would have been about ten days ago.”

“That’s just fucking nasty.”

“Dale have any enemies you know about?”

He blew out a breath. “Dale could be cruel sometimes. Especially to ugmos who hit on him.”

“Ugly people?”

“Dale never dispensed charity.”

I took it that meant deigning to frolic with less attractive beings. “Anyone seem particularly interested in Dale that night?” I asked. “Hit on him?”

“Are there bees around honey? People are always scoping Dale out.”

“Anyone buzzing around that particular evening?”

“I can’t recall anyone who …” he stopped and frowned.

“What?” I asked.

“Dale got a call on the house phone. That doesn’t happen much, everyone having cells. He was at a table and I yelled over that someone wanted to talk. Dale took the phone and handed it back, said there was no one there.”

“Male voice?”

“Deep and kind of raspy.” He lowered his voice an octave. “‘Hello, is Dale Kemp a-boot?’ Those were his words.”

“You’re using a Canadian pronunciation,” Gershwin said. “Kind of.”

The barkeep nodded. “Or maybe it was kind of British.”

I leaned close. “Tell me this, if you remember. When Dale came to the phone, was he holding his drink?”

He closed his eyes. “He held the phone in one hand and put the other over the receiver, asked who it was. He must have left his drink behind.”

“That’s the picture in your head?” Gershwin asked. “For sure?”

“I always like looking at Dale.”

We returned to the Rover where I tapped my fingers on the wheel. “The perp sits in the corner, watches. When Kemp’s friends aren’t near, he calls the landline, asks for him. The barkeep calls, Kemp gets up …”

Gershwin finished the scenario. “The perp hangs up and walks by Kemp’s booth, pausing to spike his drink with homemade witches’ brew.”

I put the safari wagon in gear and we pulled into a balmy afternoon, the street a festival of brightly plumaged youth bustling from bar to bar, called by music or hormones, the world an endless caravan of vibrant moments. They were young and beautiful and invulnerable.

Or so they supposed.

Debro left his downstairs apartment and walked upstairs with his feet crunching on the wood-plank steps. The ancient building had been a small auto-parts warehouse and the red-brick walls were crumbling on to the steps. The door at the top was metal. He unlocked it and stepped into a spacious antechamber furnished with a table beneath a wall-mounted cabinet. The far end of the chamber held a door with a small wire-reinforced window at eye level.

Debro went to the window and flipped a switch on the wall. The room beyond the chamber lit up, the light from track-mounted spots screwed into the ceiling joists. After purchasing the building last year, he’d machine-sanded the floor to be an inch higher in the center, sloping down to small gutters, the gutters feeding into the drainage system from the roof. He’d then covered the floor in linoleum, caulking the seams.

All he had to do to clean up after his penitents was hook the hose into the wall faucet and rinse the floor. Debro allowed his boys twenty ounces of water a day, which was easily mopped up, food a few nutritional gel packs squirted past their lips daily, nothing solid.

It took time to do things right … to make things right.

Debro put his eyes to the window. Two lovely sluts were in attendance, Brianna in the corner, and his latest penitent, Harold, propped against a wall and dodging invisible birds or missiles or whatever. He tried to scream but only wet croaks emerged. Every couple of minutes he’d try to stand but even his glorious, dancing legs crumpled under the weight of the black locust.

Brianna was a different case, curled in the fetal position, pissing and emitting watery gruel from her sphincter. Brianna and her sphincter had ceased to be fun. Beside, she’d been here for over a week now, and had learned her lesson.

Debro nodded: the choice was made. He stared at Brianna for several long seconds. “Brianna’s leaving us, Brother,” he said. “It’s time to get another.”

Debro returned to his apartment to consult a map of South Florida. Part of his extensive planning had involved sites where the punished could be sent, and over a dozen locations had been ringed in red. He closed his eyes, circled a digit over the map, let it drop. He had a place to drop a used one. Now all he had to do was get a fresh one.

No problem. It would soon be night.

6

We headed to Kemp’s apartment, a furnished house Kemp rented with two male roommates, flight attendants. Both had been away during the time Kemp had been abducted. One roomie, Lawrence Kaskil, arrived as we did, pulling up on a sleek racing bicycle in a white T-shirt over black Lycra biking shorts.

“I called the police on the second day I was back,” Kaskil told us, tossing his blue helmet into a closet and exchanging his biking shoes for neon green flip-flops. “It wasn’t unusual for Dale to be gone overnight, but after two days I got worried.”

“You got back from where?”

“Mexico City.”

“Your other roommate, Tad Bertram, was where during this time?”

Kaskil flapped to the small kitchenette and studied a calendar stuck to the fridge with a magnetic Scotty dog. “Tad overnighted in London, then to Cairo. He dead-headed to Rome for two days and is now back in London. He’ll be in tonight. I dread telling him about Dale.”

“Dead-headed?” Gershwin said.

“Taking a flight, but not working it. He took a couple days off to see the sights.”

I took a look at the calendar, new to us, the Missing Persons unit having neglected to do any follow-up. But Rod Figueroa had it all figured out: just a case of sexed-up boys. And why work when you can gawk at nekkid wimmen in your Hustler?

“These notes on the calendar,” I said, checking the previous month. “Dale – Tampa, Dale – SA, Dale – ORL … What’s that about?”

“Overnight sales trips. Tampa, St Augustine, Orlando. Dale put out-of-town days on the calendar.” Kaskil paused. “But sometimes he was gone overnight and it wasn’t indicated.”

“When he’d meet someone?” I said. “Like on a date?”

Kaskil nodded. “Those could be, uh, impromptu.”

“You and your other roomie, Tad Bertram … you’re gone a lot?”

“We’re here maybe eight or ten days out of the month. We joke that we each pay a third of the rent, but Dale gets the place to himself seventy per cent of the time.”

“When you arrived home from Mexico City, did anything seem amiss?”

Kaskil’s features tightened in thought. “It was like Dale had played with rearranging the furniture, then put it back almost in place, but not quite.”

“Let’s talk enemies – did Dale have any?”

“A lot of times Dale gets cruised, and if he’s not in the mood he can be fast with put-downs. But no, there’s, like, no one who has it in for him. Not enough to do such an ugly thing.”

We asked everything we could think of, then walked to the door. Kaskil asked if he and Bertram could visit Kemp and I discouraged it, telling them to wait until he regained consciousness.

I didn’t mention it was a crapshoot as to that ever happening.

We interviewed neighbors and friends of Kemp, getting nothing. When the day dwindled to dusk, Gershwin headed home and I decided to crib at the Palace, saving the hour-long drive. The Palace was a recent addition to the FCLE’s ongoing accumulation of confiscations. Gershwin and I had nailed a piece of garbage who’d made big money trafficking in human beings, hiding his gains in real estate. One property was the Palace Apartments, a small building on the west side of downtown, near the Tamiami Trail.

Roy McDermott was a director of the FCLE not for deductive abilities, but his artful wrangling of funds and favors from the lawmakers in Tallahassee, a group the masterful McDermott milked like plump cows. Roy had convinced legislators to sell off all Kazankis’s properties except the Palace, to be used as quarters for visiting FCLE staffers and an occasional safe house for witness-protection efforts.

I arrived and grabbed my overnight valise from the rear of the car. My ID card buzzed me through two bulletproof doors – an addition for the witness-protection aspect – and into a small lobby with framed seascapes on the walls. A clipboard on an elegant mahogany table indicated three rooms were occupied: two agents from Jacksonville and a departmental attorney from Tallahassee. They were on floors one and two, leaving the top floor, the fourth, fully mine.

My suite resembled an upscale extended-stay facility: twin couches and chairs in the main room, plus a large TV screen and modest sound system, a desk, a wardrobe, chest of drawers. The galley-style kitchen held cooking necessaries and a half-size fridge. The bathroom had both shower and Jacuzzi. The bedroom had a queen-size bed, another desk and chair in the corner.

Though a part of the FCLE’s inventory for three months, the Palace had already developed a fine tradition: if a visitor brought potables to the room and had something left when departing, the beverages stayed. I held my breath and opened the refrigerator …

Three cans of Bud, two of Heineken, two Cokes, and seven airline-sized bottles of liquor, including two Bacardi golden rums. Bless you, I thought, mixing a rum and Coke – no lime, but I could rough it – then tucking the file beneath my arm, and heading out. The fourth-floor suite had one aspect I prized above all others: a stairway to the roof.

I climbed and opened the door to the night skyline of Miami. Buildings towered like glass and metal hives with a skeleton staff of bees still buzzing within, whole floors dark, others alight for the cleaning staff and workers pulling all-nighters. A helicopter rumbled in the distance as traffic sounds drifted up from the street.

On my last stay I’d purchased a sturdy folding chair, and bungeed it to a vent. I set it up, put the drink beside me and my feet on the two-foot ledge. Below my soles was sixty feet of open air and three a.m. traffic, half taxicabs. I sipped rum and Coke, pulled my phone, and took another stab at my errant brother.

Per Clair’s instructions I thought so hard that my mouth formed the words Answer the phone, Jeremy. I visualized my brother cocking his head to the phone ringing in his office and lifting it to his ear … visualization another of Clair’s suggestions.

Answer …

The phone again directed me to his voicemail. Two dozen of my calls already lay in the electronic wasteland of my brother’s VM box … so much for synchronicity. Anger boiling in my gut, I held the phone to the night sky, growling, “God-dammit, Jeremy. Call me now and let me get on with my life.”

Five seconds later my phone riffed an incoming call. I checked the screen and saw the name AUGUSTE and stared in disbelief: Jeremy’s alter ego, Auguste Charpentier. I wondered if I’d already gone to bed and was dreaming.

Elmore replayed the riff, too strident for a dream, and a triumph for either Clair or coincidence. My finger hesitated over the connect button, wondering whether to voice relief or ire. Given the number of messages in Jeremy’s voicemail, I figured irritation was my due.

“Where the hell are you?” I snapped. “Why haven’t you been answering?”

“Goodness, so testy,” Jeremy said, his voice melodically Southern, not the Frenchified accent he affected with others. “I’ve been busy, Carson. No time for your idle chit-chat.”

“Idle chit-chat? I had no idea whether you were in Kentucky or Florida or … worse.”

“You mean back home in dear ol’ Alabammy?”

“Jail,” I said. “Prison. You might have been caught and I’d never know.”

“Don’t I get one call? I’d probably call you, Carson. Unless I used it to order a pizza.”

“You’re fine, then?” I sighed. “You’re still in Kentucky?”

“I’ll look for clues. I see endless trees outside my window, Carson. And the goddamn whip-poor-wills are screeching like banshees. Yes, I’m in Kentucky. Why do you ask?”

“Last year you implied you were moving to Key West. It never happened. The whole Key West thing … it’s just to unsettle me, right?”

My brother was a world-class manipulator and since he lived in isolation with no one to jerk around, I got to be the puppet.

“Why would I wish to unsettle you, dear brother?” he said, his voice a study in innocence.

“You enjoy keeping me off balance,” I said. “It’s your hobby.”

“Such drama,” Jeremy yawned. “I’ve simply been traveling, Carson. Too busy to return your calls.”

“Travel is dangerous for you. Traveling where?”

My brother’s face was on every Wanted list in the country. The photo was from his last year at the Institute, when he’d done a Brando before sitting for the photographer, filling his cheeks with tissue, propping his ears forward, flaring his nostrils. Though never expecting – at that time – to escape, he had planned for the occasion, the just-in-case kind of thinking that exemplified my brother’s mind. As a result of his planning, Jeremy resembled his photo only slightly, but a seasoned eye might see through the façade, and it would be over.

“Traveling hither and yon,” he said. “Seeing old friends.”

“You have no friends.”

“Don’t be a Negative Nelly. Of course I have friends.”

“Who?”

He changed course, affecting the high and tremulous voice of an elderly woman. “I’m … muh-muh-moldering here in the w-woods, Carson. Now th-that I’m … nearing my duh-dotage … I need h-human cuh-cuh-contact.”

“Spare me the routine. You’re not even forty-five yet. And human contact means danger.”

“I disagree, Brother,” Jeremy said, back to normal voice. “In populations where the locals are known for a live-and-let-live attitude and a soupçon of eccentricity, I can hide in plain sight if I’ve planned well.”

My irritation was turning to uneasiness. When my brother grew restive, bad things occurred. He was being cryptic as well, another dark sign.

“Planned how?”

“I’m building my final chapter, dear brother. I’m coming back to the world.”

He chuckled and hung up.

Coming back to the world? Heeding a shiver at the base of my spine, I folded my chair and retreated from the roof, suddenly feeling small and vulnerable under the vast dark plain of sky.

7

The megaphone on the wall of the south Miami bar is a two-foot tin cone that legend has stolen from ancient crooner Rudy Vallee while on a swing through Florida in the 1930s. If true, it’s safe to say that while in Vallee’s possession the cone was not embellished on both sides with a twenty-inch-long penis rendered in pink glitter, the penis aiming toward the conic apex, making the user appear to be, well … the point is obvious.

The bartender pulls the megaphone from its pegs and climbs atop the bar. He’s wearing skin-tight black jeans and an orange bowling shirt. Those who notice begin yelling No! into an atmosphere of beer, sweat and a hundred lotions, potions, and colognes.

The disco music dies in mid-air. Sweat-dripping dancers flail for a few seconds as more yells of No! echo from the walls. The barkeep raises the megaphone to his lips to catcalls. “Last call,” he says, the peniphone giving his words stentorian depth. “We close in twenty minutes. ONE drink a person … None of this ordering five, you ladies hear me?”

The barkeep takes a showy bow. Good-natured hoots follow him to the floor. The music returns. A dozen young men rush to the bar as a pair of waiters race from table to booth to take orders. “A last drink, hon?” the waiter passing Debro yells atop the shuddering bass line.

Debro shakes his head and averts his face to tap out a fake message on his phone. The waiter sprints away as Debro pats his knit cap and turns his gaze to a young man beside a table. The man is wearing a safari-style shirt atop coral shorts and for most of the evening kept his tanned legs crossed as he entertained a succession of friends and friend wannabees.

But now the feet are on the floor and legs spread wide as the man clutches his belly. For the second time in five minutes he rushes to the bathroom. Debro presses the illumination on his watch: forty-seven minutes since slipping across the shadowy bar and – pretending to stop and read one of the racy cocktail napkins – squirting five drops of the mixture into the young man’s drink. Debro has also been watching the bathroom, empty until the man entered, everyone frantic for a final drink.

He pulls his knit cap tight and walks quickly to the restroom, hearing vomiting from the far stall. He checks the other stalls to assure no one’s hooking up, arriving at the final stall as the man exits, wiping his lips with toilet paper.

“You all right, brother?” DB’s eyes frown with concern.

The man leans against the stall divider for support. “I think I just puked up my liver. Jesus, all I had was three daiquiris. Ooops …” The man spins back for another round of vomiting.

“It’s probably Fraturna Mortuis,” Debro says, knowing Jacob Eisen has no connection to Latin or medicine. Eisen turns and blinks in confusion.

“What?”

“The virus causing it. Gut started aching ten–fifteen minutes ago? Dizziness? You feel weak, right?”

The man nods. “You a doctor or something?”

“An intern,” Debro lies. “You got a ride home, right?”

“Walking. I live eight blocks away.” Eisen turns green and grabs his belly.

“How about I give you a lift, bro?” Debro says. “This will pass fast, but you’re gonna be too sick to walk.”

“I … I already am. Damn … can barely stand.” Eisen’s head spins to the left as his eye widen to their limits. “Holy shit.”

“What?” Debro asks.

“I just saw a fucking parrot. How’d a parrot get in here?”

Time to move fast, Debro thinks. Eisen’s knees buckle and Debro keeps him from dropping. The attack passes and Eisen wipes cold sweat from his forehead and studies Debro through pain-tightened eyes. “You look fum-uliar,” Eisen says, his words garbled. He touches his throat with fear. “Wha- t’ fu? My froat … I -an’t – alk.”

“Laryngitis from the virus,” Debro says, pulling Eisen close. “Here, lean on me. We can go out the back.”

“Fanks, bruver,” Eisen chokes, grateful arms encircling DB’s neck like a sick child clinging to a parent. “Yura … life … saver.” He starts to stumble and knocks Debro’s hat to the floor. Debro grabs the hat, stuffs it in a pocket, then enters the alley. He has researched every footstep. They reach the street as a quartet of men pass by.

“Is your friend OK?” one asks.

“A little touch of the bug,” Debro says. He winks.

“I know that bug,” one says. “For me it’s wine mixed with margaritas.” The others titter like birds and continue. Inebriation is as common here as the cabs on the streets.

“Shhhh, Jacob,” Debro says as Eisen struggles to speak. “We’re almost there.”

Eisen turns to Debro and swallows hard to dampen his constricting vocal cords. “I din tloo- muh nm.”

I didn’t tell you my name.

“You just forgot, Jacob. You’re sick.”

“Nuh,” Eisen chokes. He tried to push Debro away. “Ehm-ee-co.”

Let me go.

Debro sees only the receding backs of the quartet. He opens his vehicle’s rear door and grabs Eisen by his hair. Eisen screams. Though veins stand out on his throat and forehead with the effort, all that flows from Eisen’s mouth is a stream of warm air. Debro pushes Eisen into the back seat and puts a knee into Eisen’s spine, easily pulling his struggling arms back for the handcuffs, the man’s muscles like boiled rubber bands.

“Do you see us, Brother?” Debro grins as he takes his position behind the steering wheel. “Are you with me tonight?”

8

My inability to contact my brother – combined with his odd behavior – sparked strangely concocted dreams rooted in childhood, and this night was no exception. I dreamed of my father tied to a kayak I was paddling across my cove, screaming as sharks ripped away his flesh. I turned to my deck to see a two-headed man there, one face Jeremy’s, the other mine. The three of us exchanged looks of approval as my mother sat knitting silently in a chair on the strand, never acknowledging the blood-stained water moving her way.

I was enjoying the show when my phone turned the dreamscape into a shadowed pillow. I blinked my eyes, realizing I’d overnighted at the Palace, my empty glass on the bedside table with my phone. The clock said 5.48 a.m. and the phone’s screen was showing MORNINGSTAR.

“Why did I buy an alarm clock when I have you?” I mumbled.

“I stopped in to see Dale Kemp,” she said. “He’s regaining consciousness.”

I snapped upright. “What’s he saying?”

“Where? What? Water.”

“I’m on my way, Doc. Gracias.”

Wondering about Morningstar’s sudden fixation with the hospital, I found her sitting beside Kemp like a mother, her eyes scanning the chart on her lap. The heart monitor played a soft tone into the room.

beep … beep …

“He was just here,” Morningstar said, patting the hand and setting it on the sheets. “A minute ago he drifted off.”

“I’ve got to talk to him,” I said, fearful Kemp might again tumble into the cavern of his mind.

“He needs to stabilize. I’ll leave word with Dr Costa. Then when Kemp is—”

“I hear people talking about me.” Dale Kemp’s eyes fluttered open.

“Hi, Dale,” I said. “I’m Carson Ryder. I’m with the police.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“You didn’t do anything, Dale. You were drugged and abducted. But you’re safe now.”

Morningstar frowned and put her lips to my ear. “I’m not sure this is the best time for—”

“What do you remember, Dale?” I said, pressing ahead.

He tightened his eyes. “I was … getting ready to go out to a bar, uh, the Scarlet Fox. I’m trying to decide what shoes to wear. And then …”

“What?”

“Jesus,” he whispered. “They’re coming.”

“What?”

… beep … beep beep …

I heard the heart rate monitor blip more rapidly.

“Dale? Memories?”

beep, beep, beep …

“They’ve got wings.” He eyes were getting wider and he tried to push to sitting. “They’re … insects. Ahhhh SHIT!”

beep beep beep beep

“Easy, Dale,” I said. “It’s over. You’re safe.”

He looked down at his arms. “They’re eating me! Oh, Jesus … HELP ME!”

beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep …

“What the hell’s happening here?” We turned to see Costa, the attending physician, fortyish, dark and slender with angry eyes. “What are you doing to my patient?”

“I just asked a couple questions,” I said.

“SAVE ME,” Kemp howled, tubes pulling from his arms as he raised them to fend off invisible creatures. “THEY’RE EATING ME!”

Costa scrabbled in the bedside cart and came up with a syringe, deftly plunging it into Kemp’s arm. Kemp’s eyes rolled back and he sank to his pillow. Costa checked his vitals and looked between Morningstar and me, his eyes holding on her.

“Who’s idea was this?”

“It was my fault,” I said. “Dr Morningstar was against my questioning the victim. I pushed ahead anyway.”

He aimed the eyes at Morningstar. “I’m not sure you should be spending so much time here, Dr Morningstar. What can a pathologist add to my patient’s care, if I may ask?”

I objected to his conveniently impaired recollection. “She’s the one you called in to identify the toxins,” I reminded him. “When you and your people came up short.”

“My patient needs to sleep,” Costa snapped. “I want no one here but hospital personnel. You can question him when I say, but only when I say. Got it?”

We glared at one another for the required time, then Morningstar and I retreated to the lobby. “Sorry,” I said, leaning the wall by the exit. “I should have listened. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“I should have protested harder. And I was afraid it might be your lone chance to get some information.” She sighed and turned her eyes skyward. “I guess I just burned Costa as a reference.”

I was about to ask what she meant by “reference” when my phone rang, Roy.

“Another victim with symptoms similar to Kemp entered MD-General a half-hour back. A young male found in the Glades west of Miramar. Whoops … here comes the vic now.”

I paid closer attention to background sounds and heard voices and clattering wheels, a gurney, probably. “You’re at the hospital, Roy?”

“You got me interested in this thing.”

“Roy … can you stop things long enough to look at the vic’s back? It’s important.”

“Hey, Doc …” I heard a hand cover the phone, voices. Twenty seconds later Roy was back. “The victim’s in front of me, Carson. He’s as limp as a wet rag. What am I looking for?”

“Check carefully between the shoulder blades.”

“They’re lifting him. Uh … it looks like a figure eight with some scratching under it.”

I blew out a long breath. “It’s the same perp. I’m gonna head to the scene and see what the techs found.”

I called Gershwin and gave him directions to the scene. It took me fifteen minutes to arrive beside a lock separating a pair of drainage canals a few miles west of Miramar, the landscape flat and thick with swamp grass and mangrove, the sound of birds and insects as thick in the air as the scent of water.

I saw a taped-off section along a rise between the road and the canal. The crew supervisor was Deb Clayton, a pixyish woman in her mid thirties whose button nose, large bright eyes and close-cropped sandy hair would make her a perfect Peter Pan on Broadway. But instead of Pan’s tight green uniform Clayton wore a white tropical shirt, baggy brown cargo pants and red sneakers. She flanked a forensics unit step van, labeling evidence bags. One held a fishing bobber. Gershwin pulled up in a motor-pool cruiser.

“Who found him?” I asked Deb.

She walked us to the edge of the canal, green and still. “Two guys in a boat. The victim was only visible from the water.”

“Any eyes nearby?”

She nodded to the east. “The nearest house is back on Highway 27. All the perp had to do was pull off the road and drag the victim over the rise.”

I checked the sightline from the road. All you saw was wild grass. I turned to Gershwin. “The guy was probably supposed to die from exposure.”

Gershwin shook his head. “Not if the perp knows the area. This lock is where the Big Miami Canal intersects the South New River Canal. Heavily fished, more traffic on the canals than on the road. He was on display.”

“You’re sure?”

“At daybreak this becomes a parade of fishing boats.”

I crouched beside the shallow water, seeing a dark garfish hunting the shoreline for minnows. It seemed we’d just gotten a glimpse into our quarry’s mind.

“He incapacitates his victims and assaults them, Zigs. But maybe our boy doesn’t need to kill.”

“Didn’t you tell me these freaks never ramp down,” Gershwin said, looking into the flat expanse of sawgrass. “Only up?”

Debro was lazily reconnoitering bars and bistros in the near-Miami area, gauging escape routes. He’d visited most of the places, studying the seating, the lighting. The crowd. It used to anger him, the skinny little twinks finger-flicking hair from their glistening eyes as they minced from one clique to another. They’d look at him once and ignore him.

He was invisible then, too. This way was better.

Debro turned toward downtown. He’d finished his morning’s work – up before dawn, take the package to the Glades, dump it.

Buh-byee, Brianna. Did the boats dock enough for you, bitch?

He drove carefully, signaling turns, stopping fully at signs, avoiding speeding through yellow lights. If he drove poorly, his invisibility would falter. But with proper care, he could remain invisible for ever.

He saw a street sign. The comic-book shop was five blocks away, too close to let the opportunity pass. He tossed his knit cap to the seat beside him and turned the corner, pulling to the curb a dozen feet from the window glowing with neon signs. He reached for the outsize sunglasses in the glove box, but paused. He had his own mask, he realized. Right here in his hands.

Even better, he could flash the sign.

Debro pulled the cap low and strode to the store. He paused beside the building, pinched his thumbs and forefingers together before lifting his elbows skyward. The mask in place, he stepped to the window and leered inside, seeing a shape behind the counter. He pushed his groin against the window, his belt buckle clicking against the glass. If the clerk wasn’t looking before, he was now.

He turned and walked calmly back to his vehicle and climbed inside, pulling to the curb three blocks away. He pulled off his cap, set it on the dashboard, and once again made the mask with his hands.

Do you see us now?

9

The new victim’s room flanked Dale Kemp’s room and we peeked in on Kemp. He had fallen back into himself after the delirium, his face seeming a somber mask waiting only the closing of the casket lid.

We stepped to the next room and found Morningstar and, to my surprise, Roy McDermott, who offered a sheepish grin. “I couldn’t help myself, Carson. After your tutorial in the case, I got interested. I’ve got some free time, since it ain’t like I’m J. Edgar, right?”

Roy was referring to J. Edgar Hoover’s involvement in every aspect of the FBI, micro-managing, they call it now. Roy was hands-off, hiring the best people and trusting them to get the goods on the bad guys. “I don’t really care what y’all do,” Roy had once told me. “I just want to see files stamped Case Closed.”

My eyes moved to the patient on the bed, victim two. Light brown hair with a buzz cut. Closed eyes. Had I not known the vic was male, I would have thought him female, the features small and delicate. His hands lay outside the sheet and I saw digits smudged with fingerprint ink. The fingernails showed traces of red polish. I lifted the edge of the sheet, again the fading abrasions of ligatures on wrists and ankles.

“Got a hit on prints from a bust last year, Carson,” Roy said. “No biggie, caught at a traffic stop with a half-doob in the ashtray. Name’s Brian Caswell, works under the name Brianna Cass. He was reported missing eleven days ago.”

“Works as what?”

“Female impersonator, drag queen. Day job is at a nail salon.”

“How’d you find this out?”

“Checked with Missings at MDPD. I also called to see if anything new had come up, but nothing.”

“You talked to Rod Figueroa?”

Roy nodded. “Nice guy, eager to please. He asked if we could handle it as a joint case with the FCLE in full lead. Basically it means we copy him on reports.”

I shook my head in disbelief. If Figueroa had any more faces to spin he’d need gimbals in his neck. But at least it was cooperation. I studied Caswell’s motionless face. He would have been good at the cross-dressing thing, I figured, given the bone structure and lips so full I suspected collagen enhancement.

“Age?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Injuries the same as Kemp?”

Roy’s eyes went to Morningstar, so mine followed.

“Semen found orally and anally. Lots of tearing, like the attacks were violent and repeated.”

Eleven days allowed a lot of time for attacks. “Under the influence of the datura, you think?”

“It makes sense, Carson. After feeling ill, the victim starts hallucinating violently, then crashes into semi-consciousness, unable to fend off attacks or even comprehend them. If the toxins are administered on a regular basis …”

“The mind could be permanently wounded.”

“So even when a vic recovers,” Gershwin said, “we’re screwed?”

Morningstar nodded. “Ask who he saw raping him and the answer might be a purple dragon.” She looked at me. “You saw the effect on Dale Kemp.”

“It’s insane,” I said. “And yet totally rational and brilliant. After the initial capture and restraint, the perp has no need to keep victims bound. He drugs them so heavily that they’re trapped inside themselves. When he tires of them, he simply trades them for fresh meat. Even if they recover, they’ll never ID him.”

I paused as a nurse entered the room, a guy in his mid twenties, intelligent green eyes, chestnut hair just long enough to cover his ears. He had a runner’s carriage, slender and with a bounce in his steps, as if about to break into a sprint. A stethoscope hung around his neck.

“Uh, excuse me, Nurse …” Roy said.

“It’s OK, sir,” the guy said. “I’m cleared.”

The exact facts of the case were being tightly managed, the suggestion being druggings with rohypnol – more common, unfortunately. We were keeping the ingredients of this particular cocktail under wraps for three reasons: keeping secret a fact only the perp knew, legal reasons there; avoiding panic when the press dubbed the altered drinks Devil’s Cocktails or Loco-tinis or whatever; and avoiding nutbags wandering the woods with bad intentions and a botanical field guide.

Roy had outlined the situation with the hospital administration and the nurses were chosen for competence and ability to keep a secret. Plus MD-Gen was where ill or injured criminals were sent, so the staff were used to cops taking over rooms. It was, after all, Miami.

The nurse did nurse things, writing numbers from the monitors on the chart, checking the fluid drips and wires, listening through the steth. He popped the protective tip from one of the syringes loaded with the anti-robinia preparation and injected the victim. Roy stood and approached the nurse.

“You look familiar. Your name is …?”

“Patrick White. We met once before, Mr McDermott. Last fall when, uh, Mister Green was here. I was one of his nurses.”

Mister Green was Sergio Talarico, a narcotics smuggler who’d suffered a heart attack while in solitary confinement. He’d been rushed to MD-Gen where he’d had a triple bypass and seven weeks of convalescence, all without attracting the notice of his enemies, who wanted him dead so they could usurp his territories.

Roy grinned and pumped the guy’s hand. “I remember now. Past midnight and the floor’s goddamn security cameras blew a fuse or whatever, went black. Everyone freaked, thinking Talarico’s enemies were coming down the halls with AKs. All the other staffers disappeared out the exits.” Roy turned to me. “It was just this guy and two cops hunkered in Talarico’s room, not knowing what was going on.”

“Why’d you stay?” I asked White.

He winked and made a syringe-plunging motion with his fingers. “No one messes with a Patrick White patient, sir. I am one bad-ass dude with a hypodermic needle.”

I chuckled despite the grim surroundings. The guy not only had cojones, he had a sense of humor. “You been here long, Mr White?” I asked as he turned to drop the used syringe into a receptacle on the wall.

“Trained here, work here. Now I’m going for my Nurse Practitioner license here.”

The three of us wished White well as he blew out the door to his next patient, our eyes returning to the man on the bed, Brian Caswell, AKA Brianna Cass. No one spoke a word as I approached, put my hands on the bed rails, and leaned low.

“Where have you been, Brian? What did you see?”

All I heard back was the hiss of oxygen into nostrils.

10

Checking Caswell’s digs took us to the cheap side of Lauderdale, the upstairs of a two-story on a dead-end street. The lower apartment was unoccupied and the landlord’s name was Tom Elmont, a solid guy in his forties with an outdoorsman’s tan and a Marlins cap over a balding head.

“He’s a good kid, Brian is,” Elmont allowed as he led us up the steps. “People judge them too hard. Think they’re sick.”

“Judge who too hard, Mr Elmont?” I asked.

“Kids that dress up in ladies’ clothes. Brian explained how it’s like a talent show.”

He stopped outside Caswell’s door. “I used to be a hardcore metalhead back in the day,” Elmont continued. “Metallica, Def Lep, Sabbath, Kiss. One day I thought about all that stuff they were wearing … net hose, high-heel boots past their knees, ratted-out hair, black leather corsets for cryin’ out loud … and started laughing. I was a tough, super-ass-masculine young buck and here I was listening to music by guys that dressed like hookers.”

I couldn’t stop the chuckle. I turned. “Thanks, Mr Elmont. We’ll take it from here.”

“Sure. I just wanted you to know Brian is a good tenant, the best. He’s a gentle kid, maybe a little mixed up. But everything’s been mixed up since Alice Cooper.”

Gershwin pushed the door open without using the key. “Check this, Big Ryde.”

The lockset was broken, the splinters facing inward, like when you slam a door with your shoulder to get past. It was a cheap lock and wouldn’t have taken much. And with no downstairs tenant, noise wasn’t a factor.

“Forced entry,” I said, following Gershwin into the apartment. The air was suffused with the scent of sandalwood.

It was like walking into a vintage clothing store: racks of wigs, glitzy sequined gowns, feather boas, black leather undergarments, mostly faux. But it was a messy store, two racks on their sides, garments strewn across a battered sofa and the floor. A wooden chair was tipped over in a corner. The sandalwood came from the incense burner on the floor, spent sticks and sand spilling out and whisked with scuff marks.

While Gershwin scoped out the living room, I checked the kitchen, small and orderly, foodstuffs and spices stacked neatly in the cabinets. The provisions in the fridge were minimal, luncheon meat and veggies, a couple TV dinners in the freezer beside a bottle of Stoli. I checked the bedroom, a double bed beneath framed photos of Caswell in various stages of fancy dress or undress, vamping for the camera. A bedside table held a few gay porn mags, nothing freaky, at least compared to some stuff I’d seen.

The bedroom echoed the kitchen in its order. Books in a neat row on a shelf, his daily clothing arranged by color in the closet. Socks, underwear, tees, sweats … all tucked precisely in their drawers. I returned to the living room.

“Everything else this messed up?” Gershwin asked, twirling a blonde wig on his finger.

I shook my head. “Probably happened when the hallucinations started. Or Brian put up a fight. I’ll tell Elmont to hang around until scene techs can get here.”

We crossed town to see the person who’d called in the missing report on Caswell, Mitchell Peyton, a friend who had gotten worried when Caswell didn’t meet him for lunch the following day. He’d called Caswell two dozen times – Caswell a phone junkie who always answered – then notified police that something was awry.

Peyton lived in a forties-vintage apartment complex in North Miami, seedy in a gentle way, peeling paint, a palm tumbled over in the courtyard. But the architecture was classic and bright flowers bloomed along the walkways, recalling a Hollywood idol on a downhill track, but still able to put on airs.

Peyton was in his late thirties, pudgy and losing hair and affecting a maroon beret when he opened the door in floppy jeans and a wrinkled Aloha shirt. When we ID’d ourselves he shot a look toward an ashtray in the living room. I saw an unlit joint waiting the match, and he saw me see it.

“It’s OK,” I said. “Lots of people roll their own, Mr Peyton. Cigarette tobacco, right?”

“Uh, sure. Exactly. Let me just clean things up and you can come in.”

Gershwin and I diplomatically turned away and when Peyton said, “Come on in,” saw that the doob had disappeared. We entered, but declined sitting, instead leaning against the wall in a neat living room decorated with vintage movie posters: Lost Horizon, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind.

“You called in a missing report on Brian Caswell?”

“He’s been found? He’s all right?”

I laid out enough to paint an impressionistic picture, the scene without a lot of detail, leaving the door open for a hopeful recovery.

“When did you last see Brian?” I asked.

Peyton needed a glass of white wine to smooth out the news. “After his show at the Metro, a place on Mountrain Street. He was like, sitting at a table and receiving people, getting props for his show. Brianna burns up the stage.”

“People ever buy Brian drinks?”

“Always,” the beret bobbed. “It’s a way to show appreciation.”

“What’s Brianna’s act like?” I asked.

“He does Garland to Gaga, but his comic persona is Ivana Tramp, y’know, like from Trump. He’s triple bitchy, put-downs part of the act. If someone hoots at him while he’s performing, he might say, ‘Girl, why are you here buying drinks? Save that money for dermabrasion.’ It’s all in fun. I’ve got a few videos of his act if you want to see.”

My heart quickened. “From that night?”

“A couple years ago, back when Brian was developing the act.”

No help and there wasn’t much to go on in Peyton’s account of the night. Caswell had been surrounded by well-wishers and drink-buyers and he’d tottered home around one a.m.

“Brian was feeling crappy and went home. He was afraid he was getting a cold and he had a show to do the next night. He’s a trouper.”

Morningstar said symptoms could appear within fifteen minutes following a dosing, including dizziness, dry mouth, increased heart rate, flushing and a sense of general weakness … similar to the onset of a cold or flu. The effects ramped up until the victim was incapacitated.

We left Peyton to his buzz and were wondering where to go next when my phone went off: Roy. The excitement was back in his voice.

“I’m back at HQ,” he trumpeted. ‘We just got a hit on the DNA. A name. It’s over!”

We were three steps out of the elevator when Roy was in front of us, waving a report in our faces, his grin stretching from earlobe to earlobe.

“He’s nailed to the wall,” he said, snicking the page with a fingernail. “The positive on the DNA.”

“Did it just arrive?” I asked. With no former hits, the only possible way to get a match was for the perp’s chromo-map to have just entered the system, meaning he’d been arrested somewhere.

“Nope. It’s been around for twenty-six months.”

I stared. “What? How?”

Roy put a cautionary finger to his lips and motioned us to follow him to his office. We entered and he closed his door, not a typical move for Roy.

“I had a meeting with Homeland Security yesterday, the usual trading of notes. I was telling Major Rayles about the case, that we’d had no hits from the national d-base. He said he’d have our results run through Home-Sec’s database which, it seems, is more extensive than ours.”

“More extensive how?”

“We’ll get there. The main thing is, we got a solid positive on one Gary Ocampo. Right here in Miami.”

“Particulars?”

“This Ocampo is thirty. No record. I had a couple pool dicks do some fast digging. Seems Ocampo owns a small shop, Gary’s Fantasy World, selling comic books and video games. He’s the owner of the building and resides upstairs.”

I considered the information. “No priors, Roy? A bit odd.”

“Every rapist starts somewhere, right?”

I pulled my jacket from the hanger and headed toward the door. “I’ll take a team and go fetch Mr Ocampo. Can’t argue with the genetics.”

“Hold on, Carson,” Roy said. “It’s not quite that easy. Ocampo was part of a health study at the University of Florida about three years back. The DNA was taken then, consensual, part of the study.”

I gave him a so-what? look.

He said, “Those folks at HS toss a wide net, chromosomally speaking. Sometimes the net lands in a gray area.”

“You’re saying a smart lawyer might argue though the DNA sampling was consensual, its introduction into a nationwide database wasn’t?”

Roy nodded. “I just got off the phone with the state Attorney General, wanted to know if we could bust this SOB. They promised an answer within a couple hours.”

I checked my watch. We could afford to wait if it meant the difference between a clean bust and giving some shyster ammunition to muddy a case.

“I think Gershwin and I will do some shopping until the decision comes down,” I said.

“Lemme guess,” Roy grinned. “Comic books?”

11

The locale was strip malls and free-standing shops, a laundromat on the corner, a pizzeria across the street. A light breeze coaxed tree-line palms into a green hula against a cerulean sky. Down the block was a fortune teller, a second-hand clothier, a storefront tacquería, a muffler shop and a uniform store. The little shops were there because the transitional nature of the street – straddling between slums and gentrification – meant low rents, but the street was a four-lane thoroughfare in and out of downtown, with ample traffic to attract customers.

Centering the block was Gary’s Fantasy World, the brightest structure on the street, freshly painted and as white as snow. A broad front window beamed with neon signage pulsing New and Vintage Comics and Video Games and Collectors Welcome. There were two upstairs windows, both with closed curtains.

Lonnie Canseco, a senior colleague, was a block behind. He’d assembled a unit of two more FCLE dicks and alerted Miami-Dade, who’d provided four patrol cars with two-man teams. Also, as a precaution, a SWAT unit was a block away. We could have gone with a major-league assault, but it was my call, and I preferred surgical strikes to carpet bombing. If that failed, I was fine with Bombs Away.

I radioed Canseco to pull down the alley behind Ocampo’s shop in case the guy bolted out the back. My phone rang, Roy. “You’re clear, bud,” he said. “The AG says it’s fine. Nail the fucker, but be careful, right?”

Gary’s Fantasy World reminded me of an old-school record store, except the wooden bins held glassine-sleeved comic books instead of vinyl albums. Hand-lettered signs hung above bins, denoting Superman, Batman, Fantastic Four and so forth. A far wall held video games. Two glass counters in the rear held more comics. I took it they were the crème de la crème, priced from two hundred and fifty to over two thousand dollars.

“Two grand for a freakin’ comic?” Gershwin whispered.

I heard a rustle and spun to see a young male enter from a door behind the counter, early twenties, skinny as a rail, with the bleached pallor that comes from junk food and avoidance of sunlight. There was a single tattoo inside his right arm: Spider-Man in lavish color. Per current trend he affected a knit woolen hat of thick yarn, black, pulled almost to his eyebrows. Unwashed brown hair poured several inches from the hat, ending in jagged spikes.

The kid’s brown eyes stared at us without saying a word. I doubt we resembled the typical comic-book purchaser, though what did I know?

“We need to see Mr Ocampo,” Gershwin said.

“He’s not in.”

I pulled the badge, evoking puzzlement from the kid. “Where is he?” I asked. “Mr Ocampo.”

The kid looked toward the ceiling. Or maybe heaven. “Upstairs.”

“Can you call him down here?”

“Gary don’t come down here a whole lot.”

A voice appeared in the air, wheezy and almost breathless. “This is Gary Ocampo. What do you want?”

My eyes went to the corners, the front door, back. No one.

“Where are you?” I said.

“Jonathan just told you: I’m upstairs.”

He was talking through speakers. I looked around but couldn’t see the camera. “We need to talk to you, now, Mr Ocampo,” I said. “We need you downstairs.”

“I can’t,” the disembodied voice said. “Have Jonathan take you to the elevator.”

I pulled the clerk close, figuring the store was thick with microphones. “Ocampo,” I whispered. “Is he armed, Jonathan?”

“Hunh?”

“Don’t lie to me, kid. Is Ocampo sitting on a stack of guns up there?”

The clerk looked at me like I’d started making chicken sounds. “Fuck no. Gary usually ain’t even sitting.”

“What’s that mean?” Gershwin said.

The clerk rolled his eyes and waved us through the door behind the counter and into a room of inventory, boxes of magazines and games in various stages of sorting and packaging. The kid pointed to a grated opening in the corner. “The elevator. Push ‘up’ and guess what … it takes you up.”

The scene was less threatening than odd. I keyed my mic and told Canseco and the unit we were heading upstairs, then stepped into the elevator. It wasn’t a freight elevator, but not one of those house-sized lifts either; a meter and a half square or so, big enough to carry a large fridge with a couple guys beside it. It groaned between floors and stopped behind a gray panel. Gershwin and I were pressed to the sides and had our weapons at our sides, just in case.

I slid the gray panel aside, finding a room so dark we were momentarily blinded. All I could see, backlit against the vertical bands of light between the blinds, was a pale hill constructed on a low table and for a split-second my mind showed me Richard Dreyfuss creating the mud tower in Close Encounters. At the base of the hill, against the wall, was a pair of flat-screen televisions, the screens dead.

Was the rapist hiding behind the mound … aiming a weapon at our heads?

Someone sneezed. “Ocampo?” I said, crouching in the elevator. “Where are you?”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” sighed a whining voice. “Stop your dawdling and come in.”

Stepping into the room was like entering a fog made from body stink, stale air and, for some reason, a background smell of onions. Drawing closer, the mound resolved into a rounded blue sheet atop not a low table, but a large bed. The apex of the sheet fell like a ski slope to a pudgy roll of chin. The chin rounded up into a head atop fluffy pillows.

I stepped closer and heard a whirring sound as the head began to ascend, the bed mechanically inclining. Curious blue beads of iris watched me as Ocampo rose to sitting position.

“What do you think I’ve done that you enter my home with drawn weapons?” His voice was angry.

“May I see your hands please, Mr Ocampo?” I instructed.

“You think I have a gun? Is that it?”

“Hands in sight, dammit.”

He sighed and produced two fat hands, the fingers like pink overstuffed sausages. He wiggled them. “See a gun anywhere? What on earth do you want?”

“We’re interested in where you were this morning,” Gershwin said.

Ocampo’s eyes squinted tight in what I took as anger but instead exploded in a huge sneeze. He scrabbled for a tissue from a box beside his pillow. He blew his nose, rolled the tissue in a ball and dropped it in a basket beside the bed frame, almost full of used tissue. I was getting a bad feeling about this bust.

“What did you say?” Ocampo demanded, his eyes red and wet.

“This morning,” Gershwin repeated. “About daybreak. Can you tell me where you were?”

Ocampo stared in what seemed disbelief. He snapped the plump fingers, making a thub sound. “Oh, now I remember. I was running a marathon.”

“Be serious, Mr Ocampo.”

“Then I seriously assure you I was right here. Why?”

“We’ll ask the questions, Mr Ocampo,” I said, studying the mass beneath the sheet. His body couldn’t be that large. It had to be a ruse.

“What is your mobility, sir?” I asked as my hand crept toward the edge of the sheet.

Again the stare of disbelief. “My mobility?”

“It’s important.”

“I walk around the block when weather permits. Sometimes two or three times a week.” He sneezed again, repeated the motion with the tissue.

I reached out and snapped away Ocampo’s sheet, expecting to find the body of a football linesman padded out with pillows. Instead I saw a vast landscape of naked flesh, folded and dimpled and lolling, the man’s breasts drowsing down his sides like deflated porpoise heads, his genitals hidden under rumpled pouches of pimpled overhang. Several wadded tissues tumbled to the floor.

“YOU SWINE!” Ocampo screeched, scrabbling to cover himself as his face reddened. “You filthy PERVERT! You SCUM!”

I shot Gershwin a glance. Something was hideously awry. I returned the edge of the sheet to Ocampo’s hand and he yanked it back in place.

“You NAZI FILTH!” he railed. “My lawyers will destroy you!”

Gershwin nodded me to the corner of the room. “This guy couldn’t assault a box turtle, Big Ryde,” he whispered. “He’d never catch it.”

“What are you talking about over there?” Ocampo railed. “What are you plotting?”

I nodded. No matter how dangerous or desperate Ocampo’s inclinations, he would be too slowed by his volume to abduct anyone. As for slyly doping someone’s drink, the floor would shake with his approach, as surreptitious as a tractor.

“Somewhere along the way the DNA got messed up, Zigs.”

“What do we do?”

“Do you hear me you, you … fascists?”

I shot a glance at Ocampo, his face equal measures of anger and humiliation. “First, we try to mollify him. If this hits the headlines, Roy’ll tear his hair out.”

“It’s harassment, pure and simple! Storm troopers!”

We both shot glances at the huge man, scrabbling through a tabletop of crumpled tissues and allergy meds and finding an iPhone. He brandished it like a scimitar. “I’m phoning my lawyers. Then I’m calling every news station in town.”

My mind raced. Ocampo was taking photos of us, grist for his lawyer, no doubt. “I’m gonna call the lab and give them hell,” I whispered. “Get ready.”

“What lab? Who?” Gershwin said. Then, “Oh.”

I retreated to the elevator and fake-dialed my cell. “Give me fucking Pedersen,” I growled, tapping my toe impatiently. When I saw Ocampo’s eyes move to me, the act began.

“YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT,” I howled. “We’re at Ocampo’s house now. GARY-FUCKING-OCAMPO. IT’S NOT HIM! Never mind why, you asshole … It was your goddamn lab that ID’d this poor man as the perp. NO FUCKING EXCUSES. We embarrassed an innocent man and MADE OURSELVES LOOK LIKE A PAIR OF HORSES’ ASSES IN THE BARGAIN.”

“What’s he doing?” Ocampo demanded of Gershwin. “Who’s he talking to?”

“Some lab moron whose ass he’s personally gonna kick when we leave here, sir,” Gershwin said.

“I should drag you over here to apologize to Mr Ocampo in person,” I snarled. “You will?” I held my hand over the cell and turned to Ocampo. “Excuse me, sir, would it help if we had the guy responsible for this—” I pulled the phone to my mouth “AMAZING FUCK-UP”, then re-aimed it at Ocampo – “come over here and apologize to you in person?”

Ocampo looked confused. The invaders had become the protectors. “I’d prefer if you let me in on what was going on.”

“We’ll talk later, Pedersen,” I hissed into the empty phone and went to Ocampo, my face set on full contrite. The phone call had been an act, the contrition wasn’t. I saw a heavy wooden chair beneath a table in a dining alcove between the main room and kitchen.

“May I sit, Mr Ocampo?”

He nodded and I pulled the chair to the bedside. Gershwin leaned against the wall.

“There have been two recent sexual assaults, sir. The assailant left his DNA, which, it seems, was mistakenly identified as yours.”

Puzzlement on the round face. “How do you have my DNA?”

“It seems you consented to have it tested two years back, sir. You were part of a university medical study, correct?”

“I remember signing several consent forms, one having to do with DNA.”

“All DNA samples can be evaluated as part of a national database, sir. Somehow yours was obviously screwed up somewhere along the line.”

He sneezed again and grabbed a wad of tissue, blowing his nose and hawking mucus into the cloth. He wadded the tissue in a fat palm, put his left hand over the right like a foul shot and tossed the wad toward a can beside his bed, a meter to my right. The shot went wide and the ball of tissue rolled to the floor. I shot a downward glance at the tissue thinking a fresh DNA reading might not be a bad thing.

“Are you all right, Mr Ocampo?” I asked.

“Allergies. It’s hay fever season.” I looked to the window, closed tight against pollen, I assumed. Ocampo’s frown morphed into a face fighting a sneeze and losing. He grabbed another wad of tissues from the box and wiped the fleshy plains of his face and cheeks. I reached out a toe and nudged the tissue closer.

“Look, Mr Ocampo, can you accept our apology? Given the DNA indication, well, we had to check you out. We had no idea you were, uh …”

“Too fat to move much farther than the toilet? It’s OK, Detective. I’m quite aware of my body mass. I’m also aware that it makes me a poor criminal.”

Ocampo’s anger was draining away as, hopefully, were headlines saying, FCLE Arrests Bedridden Man for Violent Assaults.

When Ocampo turned away to catch another wet sneeze, I reached to the floor and snapped up the wadded tissue with my fingertips, slipping it into my pocket.

“Then I think we’re set to go,” I said. “We’re truly sorry, Mr Ocampo.”

Ocampo nodded quietly. It seemed a good exit note, hoping my ass-reaming of an unconnected phone and our gestures of kinship might keep Ocampo from contacting his lawyer.

12

We exited the store and cut between the buildings to the alley, finding Canseco in the cruiser. “Where’s Ocampo?” Canseco said as we walked up. “He wasn’t there?”

“Yep,” Gershwin said. “He was there.”

“He’s not going to the lockup?”

“Not unless you’ve got a flatbed truck, amigo,” Gershwin said.

I put the soaked tissue in an evidence bag, then called Roy and told him we were coming in empty-handed and we’d explain when we arrived. We entered his office and I gave a thirty-second rundown.

“You’re certain it’s impossible?” Roy asked. “Absolutely?”

“I pulled away the covers to make sure it wasn’t some kind of trick.”

Roy shot a look at Gershwin for his take.

“I doubt Ocampo’s dick pokes out of his fat far enough to, uh, make the journey,” Gershwin said. “And even if he tried to sneak up on someone, they’d smell him coming.”

“Bad BO?”

“Like he was sweating onions. I figure the only way Ocampo gets a full bath is if he goes through a truck wash.”

Roy turned to me. “He sells stuff right? How’s he run the shop?”

“A clerk. Ocampo seems tied in via cameras and microphones.”

Roy paced for a few seconds, pausing to stare out his window at the glittering skyline of Miami. The sparkling Biscayne Bay was visible between buildings, bright pleasure boats cutting white swaths through the blue water. Roy clapped his hands, turned to us. “Still, lab fuck-up or not, we need a DNA rule-out sample from Ocampo. Think he’ll consent?”

“Not necessary,” I said, pulling the bag from my pocket. “The guy has allergies and was pouring from his nose and eyes. This tissue went straight from his face to my pocket.”

“You’re beautiful,” Roy said.

We headed to the lab, cursorily flashing ID at the security check-in. I’d been working with the FCLE for nine months and was known by everyone. Gershwin was known as well, especially by the young woman at the front desk, pretty and Gershwin’s age, twenty-six.

“I’ll run the sample back,” I said. “You go fill in your dance card.”

He trotted to the desk, me to the lab, a maze of offices opening to a wide expanse of tables topped with microscopes, centrifuges, computer monitors and the like. A large overhead door opened to the lot, useful when entire vehicles had to be inspected. I stopped at the day-officer’s cubbyhole and was pleased to see Deb Clayton. I tossed the bagged tissue on the desk.

“Part of the rapist case, right?” she said. “You want results in a couple hours?”

“Take your time, Deb. It’s gonna be exculpatory.” I explained the circumstances.

“This happen much?” Gershwin asked, stepping into the room. “A mix-up?”

Deb leaned her small frame against a table. “Big testing labs handle thousands of samples daily. Sometime whole batches get screwed up.”

“What if it got mixed up at the test site?” Gershwin asked. “At the university.”

“Happens less often, since protocols tend to be tighter. But it’s a possibility.”

I saw where Gershwin was going: instead of thousands of candidates for the mix-up, it might be dozens.

“Let’s head to the U,” I said.

Medically oriented studies were handled, naturally, by the medical department, a complex of buildings with related disciplines. We were directed to the Office of Experimental Research and entered a room looking more business than academe: russet carpet, peach walls hung with color-coordinated abstracts, a half-dozen chairs along the wall.

We announced ourselves to a receptionist and wandered the office, footsteps suctioned into the soft cushion of carpet. Dr Marla Roth appeared seconds later, a slim woman in her late fifties with short and graying hair and intelligent brown eyes that stared over the tops of half-circle reading glasses. When we produced badges she hid the surprise and led us down a short hall to her office, more cluttered than the entrance, three walls holding bookshelves arrayed with binders. Her voice was warm, but precise, like a friendly accountant. She directed us to sit, and I outlined the reason for our visit.

“Yes,” she said. “I was in charge of that survey. May I ask what you’re looking for?”

I gave her the Reader’s Digest version and she frowned, probably at the implication of a mistake. She went to a shelf, fingers flicking over files until pulling one and bringing it to her desk.

“Since you’re alluding to a potential mix-up in our process, I want to be exact.” She read for a minute, looked up over the glasses. “The study involved two phases. The first was purely observational, accruing data from participants ranging from moderately to morbidly obese. Eligibility criteria included repeated attempts to lose twenty per cent or more of body mass, but failing. A major percentage of those who lose that much weight regain it within two years.”

“Were you looking at factors other than obesity?”

“Psychological factors were a second eligibility requirement. Participants depressed by the inability to shed weight, with resultant problems. Insecurity, self-directed anger, that sort of thing. If you’d attempted suicide because of weight-related issues, you were automatically chosen. Group therapy was part of the study, both moderated and off-site, much like AA meetings.”

“What was phase two?”

“That was more quantitative and involved study of caloric intake and so forth. That’s when the DNA sampling was done, the intent being to determine whether obesity has genetic markers.”

“Who sponsored the testing?”

“The National Institutes of Health. Total enrollment was one hundred fifty-seven, males and female, about equally split.”

I looked at Gershwin. We could eliminate the females from the study, obviously. But investigating seventy-five potential suspects was a huge task.

“May I ask the name of the person you’re talking about?” Roth asked.

“Gary Ocampo,” I said. One name in seventy-five. “Do you recall him?”

A brisk nod. “Gary was as troubled as he was intelligent – and he’s very smart. He used self-deprecating humor to mask very deep insecurities, the result of a rather nasty childhood as well as a lifetime of being mocked about his weight. As with most of our larger participants, we did the tests and interviews at his home. For the support-group work he had to come to our facility. He was hesitant at first, but something changed and he really got into it.”

My breath stopped. Had we caught a break?

“How is sampling accomplished?” I asked.

“A nurse hands the patients a swab and explains how to gather material from between gum and inner cheek. The swab is immediately put into a vial and labeled with name and patient code. One swab, one pre-labeled vial. Swab to volunteer, to mouth, to nurse, to vial. No way to make a mistake.”

I sighed, the precise chain-of-custody not what I’d wanted, hoping the nurse tossed Ocampo’s spitty swab into a purse with a half-dozen others and didn’t think to label them until getting back to the U. I thanked Roth and stood to leave.

“Happy to help,” she said. “By the way, how much does Gary weigh these days?”

“About five hundred pounds.”

She looked down at her records and brightened. “Five hundred? Wonderful.”

“Why wonderful?”

“He must have gotten motivated. He’s lost over a hundred fifty pounds.”

13

Patrick White sat at the desk in his apartment, its surface covered with books: Gray’s Anatomy, Human Musculature, Medical-Surgical Nursing. An ironing board was opened at his back, three fresh-pressed nursing uniforms hanging from the board. Music played at low volume, études by Debussy. Outside his window the setting sun had turned the sky into layers of purple and orange.

Patrick’s cell shivered an incoming call. He studied the caller’s name and rolled his eyes.

“Hi, Billy,” he said. “What’s happening?”

“You going to Kevin’s birthday party on Saturday, Nurse Goodbody?”

“Hunh-uh. Gotta study.”

“Bitch. All you do is work anymore.”

Patrick leaned back and tossed his pencil on a book. He spun his head in a circle to loosen his neck. “I have to hit the books, Billy. Got a major anatomy final next week.”

“If Kevin’s party is like last year’s, you’ll see lots of anatomy.” A wicked chuckle. “Take notes.”

“If Kevin’s party is like last year’s, I’ll have a two-day hangover. Can’t do it.”

“Gawd … when did you get so serious? Listen, a few of us are going to the Grotto tonight, just a few drinkies. Here’s an idea: close the fucking book and grab your pretty ass.”

Pictures of the Grotto flashed through Patrick’s head: dark corners, flashing lights, splashing drinks and sweaty dancing bodies, eyes scoping from every direction. It was a pick-up bar, raw sex seeping from the dingy, paint-peeling walls, the bathroom air bitter with the scent of amyl nitrite, any conversation quashed under waves of bass-heavy dance tunes.

The Grotto was Billy’s kind of place, but not Patrick’s. Not any more.

“I’m not doing the Grotto, Billy. No way.”

“You want a study break, Nurse White, have a real one.”

“How about D’Artagnan’s instead?” Patrick said.

“Oh, puh-lease,” Prestwick pouted. “Darts is so lame. All people do there is talk.”

“I’ll go to Darts, Billy. Not the Grotto.”

“Oh, all right, little Miss Picky. if you’re not there, I’m gonna strangle you with your own stethoscope.”

Patrick flipped the textbook closed. “I’ll see you around nine, Billy. But when the clock strikes ten-thirty …”

“You’ll become a pumpkin and mice will pull you home. Buh-byeee.”

Gershwin and I were grabbing a fast taco from a downtown street vendor when word arrived that Gary Ocampo’s DNA sample was running through the new machine and the results were nearly analyzed. We used the siren to move traffic aside and I think there were a couple times I cornered on two wheels.

At the lab we found Roy frowning at the ceiling, arms crossed as his fingers twitched the need for a cigar. Deb Clayton had turned away to take a phone call.

“Who is it?” Gershwin asked Roy.

Roy shook his head. “You ain’t gonna believe it.”

“Out with it,” I said. “Who’s the perp?”

“The DNA says it’s Gary Ocampo,” Roy said, passing me the printout of test results. “Still.”

“No way,” I said, staring at the report. “No way in hell.”

“The perp’s DNA matches Ocampo’s DNA,” Roy said. “Somehow your quarter-ton comic-book salesman has abducted and assaulted at least two healthy men.”

Gershwin thought a moment, snapped his fingers. “Maybe Ocampo’s got some crazy accomplice who’s … it’s too weird.”

“What?”

“Squirting Ocampo’s juice into the victims. Ocampo jacks off and puts it in a turkey baster. The rapist …”

Roy held up a hand. “Let’s wait for Deb to get off the phone before we spin off the planet. She’s checking with a DNA expert.”

She hung up and turned to us. “It can’t be Ocampo, Deb,” I said, feeling like the world was upside-down. “There is no way the guy could assault anyone.”

“Yet it’s his DNA, Carson,” she said, a twinkle in her eyes. “And at the same time, it isn’t. Ever study biology?”

A long-ago memory interceded. I slapped my forehead.

“What?” Roy said, cigar-denied fingers twitching like he was typing.

“He’s a twin,” I said. “Ocampo’s got an identical twin.”

We were back at Gary’s Fantasy World in twenty minutes, the time almost nine o’clock, the shop window bright against the dark. Ocampo was sitting and tapping at a laptop, setting it aside as we entered. The room had recently been dosed with a pine-scented air freshener, but nothing removes the undertone of too much body in too little space.

I pulled a chair to his bedside. “You have a brother, right, Mr Ocampo? An identical twin.”

Ocampo’s mouth dropped open. “How on earth can you know that?”

“I, uh … took another sample of your DNA yesterday – a tissue. Legal, but perhaps a bit, uh, covert.”

He frowned and I feared another verbal assault. Instead, he crossed his arms in justification and arced an eyebrow. “What does that have to do with my brother?”

“Your DNA still matches the samples taken from the victims.”

“What?”

“There’s only one answer: the DNA came from your brother. Do you have any idea where he is?”

Ocampo looked like I was speaking backwards and he had to translate my words into forward. “Wait … what you mean is … you’re saying my brother, Donnie Ocampo, is the one doing these terrible things? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Beyond a doubt. Your brother’s name is Donnie?”

Ocampo nodded. “It was. I guess it still is.”

“He changed his name?” I asked, puzzled.

“Donnie died a week after he was born, Detective,” he said quietly. “He’s been dead for over three decades.”

14

Gershwin and I extracted as much information as possible from a confused and distracted Ocampo. He was born in a Texas border town, his father dead by the time Ocampo hit the world. He hadn’t known about the brother for years, until one day a drunken and teary-eyed mother spoke of a dead twin. At first he’d disbelieved the story as an alcoholic’s mutterings, but his mother had produced photos of two babies on a bed – home birth by a midwife – and the two children as exactly alike as, well, identical twins.

There was only one thing to do: go to the town of the Ocampo’s birth and check the records. Though Ocampo had lived the first ten years of his childhood in Laredo, Texas, he had been born across the border in Mexico, Nuevo Laredo. I took it that his father was a Filipino who’d been working a construction project in the town when Ms Ocampo went into labor. I also took it that Ocampo’s father only worked sporadically owing to a problem with alcohol.

Two alcoholic parents, I thought. No wonder the guy’s got problems.

“So there are these four boys in a gay bar and they’re arguing about who has the longest dick …”

Gerry Holcomb moaned. “Gawd, not again.”

Billy Prestwick reached across the table and slapped at Holcomb. “Don’t stop me if you’ve heard it. Just shut uuuup.”

Patrick leaned back in the upholstered booth. The place was half full, the crowd older and more professional, more paired. Several men wore suits or sport jackets from a day at a bank or ad agency. A couple of dykosauruses sat at the bar, rugged-looking women in their fifties, drinking shots and beers and grumbling about jai-alai teams. The bartender, a tall and balding man with a beret and a John Waters mustache, cradled a phone to his neck as he polished his nails with an emery board.

“The boys have been arguing about their dicks for like ten minutes,” Prestwick continued, pushing silver-blond hair from his eyes, his long arms pale and slender and in constant flittering motion. “They’re getting louder and more obstreperous and—”

“Ob-what?” Ben Timmons said.

“Ob-strep-er-ous, you illiterate slut. Buy a dictionary. So finally the bartender gets fed up and says he’ll settle the argument once and for all and to drop their pants and slap their dicks on the bar …”

Bobby Fenton grinned and fanned at his crotch. “You mean put them on the bar and really slap them?”

“Shut up, bitch, I’m telling the joke. The bartender tells the boys to drop trou and set their penises on the bar. So one by one the boys slide their jeans to their knees, scrunch up to the bar, and lay their doodles across it, pulling them out as far as they can. Just then, a guy walks in the door, glances down the bar, and yells, ‘I’ll have the buffet!’”

Moans and groans. Fenton said, “I’m gone. Some of us have to work in the morning.” Timmons said the same and he and Holcomb filed from the booth to back pats and air kisses until it was just Billy and Patrick standing outside the booth. Billy put his arm around Patrick’s shoulder and pulled him close. His breath was dense with tequila from a half-dozen margaritas.

“So there’s this guy comes out of a bar after drinking beer for three hours …”

“I heard it, Billy.”

“Shush! Not tonight you haven’t. The drunk staggers to an intersection, unzips his fly and yanks out his wand. Just then a cop runs up and says, ‘Hold on, mister, you can’t piss here.’”

Patrick crossed his arms and waited. Billy affected a drunken voice and pretended to aim a penis at the far horizon. “‘I ain’t gonna pissh here, occifer,’ the drunk says. ‘I’m gonna pissh way … over … there.’”

“It was funny the first three times,” Patrick yawned. “Four, maybe.”

“Gawd, Patrick,” Prestwick moaned. “Lighten up while I go way … over … there and take a piss.”

Prestwick started toward the bathroom, stopped when Patrick grabbed his arm and pointed at Prestwick’s half-filled glass, sitting on the edge of the table.

“You left your drink, Billy. What have I been telling everyone?”

Prestwick affected ignorance. “Don’t lay your doodle on bars?”

“I’m not laughing.”

“Uh, lemme see … Don’t leave drinkies unattended?”

“I mean it, Billy. Never let your glass out of your sight.”

Prestwick picked up the remainder of his drink, drained it away in a single chug, set it back on the table upside-down. He shot Patrick a wink, mouthed, “Thanks, mummy,” and ambled toward the bathroom tapping at his phone to check the barrage of tweets and Instagrams and Facebook updates. He walked into a barstool, corrected, re-aimed for the dark hall holding the bathrooms.

Patrick sighed, used to Billy’s hip-swinging sashays down a sidewalk, the vocal trills for emphasis, the bottomless supply of jokes. Patrick knew that somewhere in the twelve years since they’d met in high school, he had become an adult. He wondered if Billy ever would.

At times Billy showed flashes of adulthood, of introspection, moments in which he realized that his youth and looks were a finite commodity, and though they carried him now, the passage was growing briefer. But such moments were always transient, the span of a meteor across the night sky, as minutes later Billy was ordering another round, or leaving to “comfort” an older man who would repay Billy with one or another generosity, or sometimes just a fistful of cash.

“Come on, buddy,” Patrick whispered to Billy’s retreating back. “Grow up.”

Prestwick entered the bathroom and relieved himself from two feet away, allowing him to splash his initials on the rear of the urinal. He zipped up and turned to the mirror to check the magic.

A face appeared over his shoulder.

“Hello, Billy,” the face said.

Billy spun. “Uh, do I know you, dear?”

“It’s been a long time. You are Billy Prestwick, right?”

“Now you don’t know?” Billy said.

The face didn’t reply. It just stared, as if amused.

“Yes,” Billy said. What did this thing want? “I’m me.”

“And the man you’re sitting across from …” the face continued, like filling in a space on a crossword. “The fellow with the brown hair. That’s uh … lemme see if I can remember …”

Billy hated memory games. “Patrick, Patrick White. You know him, too?”

“Just briefly.”

Billy frowned. “When did we meet?”

“You really don’t remember me?”

“Of course I do, dear, I’m just so poor at names.” Billy also hated guess-where-we-met games. He reached out to touch the man’s shoulder but something made him stop short of contact. “Listen, dearie, great to see you again and all, but I’ve got a par-tay I’ve got to get to.”

The man nodded and smiled like he knew something Billy didn’t.

“Yes … there’s a party waiting for you, Billy.”

The man turned toward a urinal, unzipped as he walked. Billy started to wash his hands but suddenly realized he didn’t want to be in the bathroom any longer and stepped toward the door.

Patrick watched Billy exit the restroom and walk quickly to the table, his pale face frowning he glanced backward toward the dark hall that led to the bathroom.

“You look strange,” Patrick said. “You OK, Billy?”

“It’s nothing. I just saw a guy who knew me. He kinda looked familiar, but …”

Patrick looked toward the bathroom. The guy was either burrowing in for the long haul or had booked out the back door. “Probably someone you met at a party when you were drunk. How often does that happen, Billy?”

Prestwick grabbed at his bag, missed the strap, got it on the second try and slid it over a boney shoulder poking from a purple tank-top with a sequined target centering the chest. “Don’t be a nag, Nurse White.”

“Where you going?” Patrick asked.

Rolled eyes. “My gawd, Patrick … between you and the thing in the pisser I’m playing Twenty Questions tonight.”

“Someone’s gotta worry about you, Billy. Tell me where you’re headed.”

A flash of guilt was quickly replaced by a lopsided grin.

“I gotta date, sweetums. Kind of.”

Patrick frowned. “Someone you know, right? Someone safe?”

Billy shuffled through his bag, arranging phone and iPad, make-up and spare underwear. Patrick knew it as Billy’s avoidance move, and pressed forward.

“Come on, Billy. It’s someone you know, right? Not a stranger?”

“Oh, almost. He’s like a friend of a friend, just some old bear who likes to sit on his Miami Beach veranda and tell tales about the old days, Stonewall and the Castro and whatever. I’ve heard that he’s sweet and harmless and …”

“And might give you a loan you don’t have to repay?”

“I make sweet old men feel young for a few hours. I think of it as charity work. You flying back to Kansas?”

Patrick nodded to the half-mug of ale. “Two sips and I’m outta here.”

Prestwick affected a thousand-watt grin, teetering slightly in his burgundy loafers. “You’ll be running that place, one day. Head Nurse Patrick White, Queen of All the Bedpans.”

Patrick sighed. “You’re taking a cab, right, Billy?”

“My white knight.” Prestwick kissed Patrick’s temple. “Yes, girlfriend. I’m cabbing. Buh-byee!” He started for the door, but was stopped by an invisible force. Turning back to Patrick, without a word he wrapped him in a hug so tight Patrick imagined he felt the beating of Billy’s heart.

“Thank you, dear,” Billy whispered. “Thank you for caring.”

“Some of us do, Billy. We get worried about … about where you’re going. Where you’ll be five years from now.”

Billy stood back with a quiet smile verging on sadness. He flicked a comma of hair from Patrick’s forehead.

“Goodness, Patrick, so existential all of a sudden.”

“You’re smart and talented, Billy. Stop wasting it and use it to do something, go somewhere.”

Billy blew out a breath. His eyes went to the floor and when they rose to meet Patrick’s eyes, were clouded with guilt. But then, like a bright mask clasped to a penitent visage, Billy Prestwick’s face lit in mischief. He winked.

“I am going somewhere, dear Patrick. I’m going to Miami Beach.”

And like smoke in the wind, Billy Prestwick was gone. Patrick righted Prestwick’s glass, wiping spilled margarita with a napkin, putting the napkin in the glass and putting it aside. He walked to the window to see Billy gathered into a swooping flash of yellow taxi, heading to his next destination, never quite knowing whether it would hold danger or sanctuary.

Patrick shook his head. Had he ever been so self-consumed and moment-driven?

Once upon a time. And not all that long ago.

15

Debro sat in his car across the street from D’Artagnan’s and watched Patrick White through the window. He’d slipped out the back after his conversation with Billy Prestwick. An eight-year-old movie began playing in Debro’s head. The pictures still hurt. Sometimes they stung like hornets.

The movie montage comes from a trendy gay hangout long closed by the cops for underage drinking. The bar, owned by two old queens nicknamed Harold and Maudlin, kitsch collectors, was the place to be that spring, festooned with comic excess on the walls and ceiling: a moose head wearing sunglasses, a bent trombone, a blow-up doll dressed in a tie-dye miniskirt, posters from fifties sci-fi movies, funky birdhouses, a sagging accordion, a stuffed raccoon wearing Mardi Gras beads. The setting evoked fun and laughter.

Having spent days steeling his courage to step inside the bar, a younger Debro orders a gin-gin at the bar. The skinny, arrogant barkeep gives him a sneering once-over and brings the drink five minutes later, retreating to the far end of the bar to talk with a handsome boy in a Panama hat.

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