Dead Last Read online

  “You remembered him putting on the tats, you’d remember the other.”

  Buddha was silent, looking out at the windsurfers and the sailboats and the charter boats coming in from the far reaches of the bay.

  “This TV show,” he said. “Does the guy in the bodysuit use the same weapon every time?”

  “Each show it’s different. He picks it after reading the obit.”

  “So if the real killer is doing that, switching weapons, searching for that Zulu spear on ViCAP, that won’t work.”

  “I put it in just in case. It’s all I had.”

  They crossed the causeway in the opposite direction and Buddha surveyed the view again, but this time she didn’t seem as awed. Miami had that effect. Teased you for a while with its gorgeous panoramas, its exotic scents, its sensual drumbeat, then left you hungry for something you couldn’t name.

  She pulled the Ziploc evidence bag from her purse, took Rusty’s obituary out, and spent a few minutes musing on it. When he looked over again she was touching her fingertip lightly to the pointy edges, holding the paper up to the light.

  He saw his name shine through the flimsy page. Rusty on one side, him on the other. Rusty with the angels, Thorn with the society fucks.

  He took Brickell Avenue north, passing the wall of condos where the young professionals who worked downtown spent their nights, living among the snowbirds from Germany and Canada and Brazil.

  Going against rush hour, making decent time, Thorn tried his right hand on the steering wheel but the fingers wouldn’t close. It was going to be a while before he was using chopsticks.

  “Do you sew, Thorn?”

  “Sew?”

  “Needle and thread.”

  “The occasional button on a shirt.”

  “Did Rusty?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “You know what pinking shears are?”

  “Some kind of scissors.”

  “Scissors with a sawtooth blade. They cut a zigzag pattern. Seamstresses use them to trim the edges of woven fabric so it won’t unravel.”

  She held up the obituary.

  “Zigzag like this.”

  “I wondered about that. It’s so regular.”

  “This shirt I’m wearing,” she said, “I made this, and these pants too.”

  Thorn fetched for a compliment about her clothes, but couldn’t think of anything that sounded halfway honest. So he was quiet.

  “I make all my own apparel, but I never use pinking shears. What I use is what most everybody uses, a rotary cutter. It looks like the roller they slice pizzas with. That’s how you make these zigzag edges nowadays.”

  Thorn asked her why any of this mattered.

  “There’s a difference between the zigzags a rotary cutter makes and the one pinking shears do. The Vs on a rotary blade design aren’t as deep, the tips of the zigzags are sharper with shears. This obituary was cut with pinking shears, not a rotary blade.”

  In his rearview mirror Thorn saw the sky darkening out over the Everglades. July late afternoon thunderstorm flaring up right on schedule.

  “Pinking shears, they’re old-fashioned. You don’t see them around anymore. My grandmother used them.”

  “So we’re looking for an elderly seamstress.”

  She looked over, not smiling, and shook her head in resignation.

  “Everything’s a joke with you.”

  “When I can, I like to embrace the light side.”

  “We’re looking for someone who owns a pair of pinking shears. And the pair we’re looking for has a nick on the blade.”

  “What nick?”

  “The shears that cut this paper are dinged in one spot. It’s very small, but it’s there. You can see it, how the blade left a series of tiny indentations.”

  They were stopped for a red light on the edge of downtown where the condos ceased and the banks and insurance buildings began.

  Buddha held up the newsprint and pointed out several imperfections in the jags that edged the paper.

  “Probably what happened, somebody was using their shears to cut material and didn’t see a straight pin hidden in the fabric, and wound up chomping down on it and dinging the blade. Appears to be about midway up. So from that point on, whatever they cut, they leave that same little notch here and here and here.”

  She pointed out the places on the newspaper’s edge where the scissors had left its signature. Thorn could’ve studied that clipping for a year and not noticed those nicks. But they were there.

  The light went to green and a teenage kid in a black pickup behind them waited a hundredth of a second before he held down his horn. Not just a light tap to wake Thorn up, but a full-throttled fuck-you-get-moving-asshole honk.

  Thorn got moving. Going slower than he might have otherwise.

  “Too bad there’s not a pinking shear database,” he said.

  “Make a note of it, set it aside.” Buddha allowed herself a brief smile.

  “Incest porn and pinking shears,” he said. “We’ve had a good day.”

  “And it’s not even suppertime.”

  Thorn found a parking space on South Miami Avenue a block from the bar. They were ten minutes early. The first few spatters of rain hit the windshield. Thunder grumbled in the west. For some reason he was reminded of an old Labrador retriever he’d once had, the way it moaned in its sleep.

  “I’m betting she won’t show.”

  “Oh, she’ll show.” Buddha was studying Rusty’s obituary again.

  Thorn watched the rain smear the windshield. He saw a homeless man in a camouflage jacket walking slowly down the sidewalk. He had shoulder-length gray hair and a bad limp. He didn’t seem to mind the rain. Maybe it reminded him of the monsoons in southeast Asia back when he was fighting in that hopeless war. Thorn watched him cross the street a half block down, a black plastic garbage bag slung over his shoulder. A man who had trimmed his possessions to only what he could lug. By those austere standards, Thorn had a long way left to go.

  “I’m an idiot,” Buddha said.

  “What now?”

  “I’ve been in a daze since I found Mickey’s body. Getting on a jet plane, flying to Miami, shooting a gun out of your hand, watching a big-time TV show being made. I kept looking at this obituary, but my eyes must’ve been glazed over, and I didn’t see the one simple, obvious thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “On the show the Miami Ops agents are always trying to interpret the obituaries. But they never get anywhere. That’s because they’re looking for connections between the deceased person in the obit and the murder victim. They’re not looking at the words of the obituary itself.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Think about it, Thorn. A guy reads an obit in the Miami paper. He’s going to use it as a roadmap to kill his next victim. What’s he need to know?”

  “The name of the victim.”

  “That’s one thing, yeah. And there’s at least two more I can think of.”

  “Where the victim is located.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t know, what else?”

  “The weapon,” Buddha said. “Name, location, weapon. He finds all that hidden in some random obituary. It’s like the I Ching. You know the I Ching?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “It’s a book of hexagrams. The Chinese use it for fortune-telling. Hippies used to play around with it. My old man had a copy, he’d get stoned, flip open to a random page, read the hexagram, and his deepest questions were answered. Should he get pepperoni or anchovies on his pizza?”

  Thorn licked his fingertip and made a check mark in the air.

  “One for the sheriff.”

  She nodded, pleased to be on the board.

  “With good dope,” Thorn said, “any book would probably do.”

  “Probably,” she said. “But for the Chinese, the I Ching is the universe in miniature. It embodies all the major principles; ease, simplicity, change, transformation, and pe
rmanence. Everything in the universe is changing, but underlying all existence are a few simple, permanent principles. Obituaries are the same. People are dying, that’s the serious change, but permanent principles underlie all deaths. Constants. Who, what, where.”

  Thorn considered that. A weighty thought. Way too weighty at the moment. No sleep, no food, two beers.

  “So the killer’s an elderly Buddhist seamstress.”

  He smiled at her but she shook her head, not having it.

  “The obituaries are the killer’s I Ching. He’s finding his answers there. Name of victim, location, weapon. That’s what he’s looking for, so that’s what he finds. Rusty’s obituary led him to Michaela in Starkville.”

  “How?”

  “It’s sitting there on the surface,” she said. “Listen to this, it’s in the ninth paragraph of Rusty’s obit, first sentence of the paragraph. “‘Rusty was spearheading a fundraising campaign that brought in six hundred thousand dollars…’”

  “Spear,” Thorn said.

  “There’s the weapon. Then in the first sentence of the third paragraph ‘Starkville, Oklahoma,’ appears. Rusty’s birthplace. It turns into the location of the victim.”

  “So the psycho goes and buys a spear and heads off to Oklahoma. But how’s he home in on Michaela Stabler? There’s no mention of her.”

  “I haven’t got that yet.”

  The rain shower had passed and steam was rising from the street.

  “Which means all that Shaka Zulu, Iklwa stuff is irrelevant. It could’ve been any spear. A generic spear would have been fine.”

  “Seems that way,” Buddha said. “Wrong turn down the wrong street.”

  She watched a Cuban street vendor walking past her window with a crate of limes. He offered them mutely and she declined with a shrug.

  “The guy’s stuck on threes.”

  “What?”

  Thorn said, “Read the first sentence of the sixth paragraph.”

  Buddha looked over at him.

  “Go on. Read it to me.”

  She counted down the paragraphs till she found it.

  “After graduation, Stabler devoted herself to building her charter fishing business into a thriving enterprise.”

  “Third word, sixth paragraph. ‘Stabler.’”

  “Third word, ‘spearheading.’ Third word, ‘Starkville.’”

  “Any other Stablers living in Starkville?”

  She considered it a moment, then said, “Used to be several, but they either died or moved off. Mickey was the last surviving Stabler in town.”

  “Well, there you go. Where, who, how. Three paragraphs down, three words in. Take a spear to Starkville and kill the only Stabler in town. This character has a thing for three.”

  She held her fist up for a knuckle-bump. Thorn had never bumped fists with anyone before. He didn’t travel those circles. But Buddha was smiling, her fist waiting, and Thorn clenched his sore right hand and tapped her fist, knuckle to knuckle. Goofy but good.

  “Incest porn, pinking shears, and three paragraphs down, three words in. We’re on a serious roll.”

  “There’s something else,” Buddha said. Smile gone, mood swinging to somber. “The Atlanta situation. That cop stopping a guy in a black bodysuit. That happened on a Saturday. Michaela was killed on a Saturday.”

  “People are home on Saturdays. They’re off work.”

  “Maybe Saturday’s his killing day. He’s got a routine.”

  “That’s a stretch,” Thorn said. “Some guy stopped in Atlanta wearing a Zentai suit on the same day of the week that Mickey was killed—sorry, before you can say the guy’s got a timetable you need a bigger sample.”

  She rolled her eyes upward as if she was adding a column of figures.

  “What day was Rusty’s obit in the paper? Tuesday?”

  “Monday,” Thorn said.

  “The killer reads it Monday, three days later he’s bought a spear, two days after that he’s used it.”

  “Okay, he’s on a tight schedule. That’s about all you can say for sure.”

  “Who else is on a tight schedule?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People we’ve met in our investigation so far. Who meets that description?”

  “You mean the TV people?”

  She lifted an eyebrow at him.

  “Lots of people are on a tight schedule. Especially in this town.”

  “Just saying.”

  She sat in silence, staring out at the rain-slick street. Cars hissed past in both directions. Drivers tailgating, honking, looking for an edge, everyone angry, in a hurry and on a mission a lot more important than anyone else’s.

  “What’s the closest major airport to Starkville?”

  She touched a fingertip to the shark-tooth edges of the obituary.

  “Dallas/Fort Worth. Three hours south.”

  “Might want to contact your new FBI friend. Ask Sheffield to pull the passenger manifests for every airline flying Miami to Dallas on Friday or Saturday the weekend Mickey was killed. It’d be a big list, but it’s a place to start. Sounds like some fun police work for you.”

  Buddha was staring out the windshield, shaking her head.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This doesn’t seem too easy to you?”

  “Which part?”

  “Decoding the obituary. Three paragraphs down, three words in. We’re not talking serious encryption, that’s some kind of kindergarten code.”

  “The guy’s a halfwit. You heard Frank, we’re having a national shortage of criminal masterminds.”

  “No. This feels weird, like we’re being punked. Like it’s just lying there out in the open, too obvious.”

  “It’s interrogation time.” Thorn nodded at the dashboard clock.

  Buddha frowned at the obituary as she slid it back into the evidence bag.

  “Time to dangle me in front of April, see if her eyes light up.”

  “Oh, they will,” Buddha said. “They already did.”

  ELEVEN

  AT QUARTER AFTER FIVE, WITH Buddha in the john, April Moss entered Poblanos. She’d changed into gray skinny jeans and a drapy black top that showed her figure but didn’t flaunt it. A trim woman with a healthy shape. She’d pulled her dark brown hair back into a loose bun, a few long wisps escaping down her neck.

  Thorn stood up from behind the round table and watched her walk across the room. Her lips were clamped, a what-the-hell-am-I-doing look on her face.

  He pulled out a chair and waited for her.

  She sat. Thorn sat across from her and they looked at each other.

  “Where’s your friend?”

  “The loo.”

  They waited in silence. Looking at each other, then looking away.

  “So now what?” April said.

  “It’s a bar,” Thorn said. “We order a drink, we talk, see what’s what.”

  “It still works like that? I haven’t been in a bar in so long, I thought maybe things had changed.”

  “Order, talk, see what’s what. Same as always.”

  “Like a date.”

  Buddha appeared and took the seat between them.

  “Not like a date,” Buddha said. “More like a homicide investigation.”

  The barmaid came, knew April from way back, fussed over her, long-time-no-see, took her order, Chardonnay, then got Thorn’s and Buddha’s. Another Red Stripe for Thorn, water with lemon for the sheriff.

  “You guys have food?” Thorn wanted to know.

  “Fried cheese sticks,” the waitress said. “Chicken nuggets.”

  “Double order of both,” Thorn said. “An angioplasty on the side.”

  Nobody smiled.

  “Buddha?”

  “I’ll wait till there’s real food,” she said.

  The waitress gave April a consoling look—the morons we endure.

  “This is almost as awkward as our date,” April said.

  “You remember it clearly, do you
?”

  “Sure,” she said. “It was an unforgettable evening. The moon, the water, all those tequila shots, vomiting in your bathroom.”

  “Did you take advantage of this woman, Thorn?”

  “No, he didn’t,” April said. “It was fifty-fifty. If anything I forced myself on him.”

  “But you were drunk,” Buddha said.

  “We knew what we were doing.”

  “Whoa,” Thorn said. He waved a hand, but neither looked his way.

  “You use protection?” Buddha asked April.

  “Jesus,” said Thorn. “Boundaries.”

  “Did you?” She was looking hard at April.

  One of April’s eyebrows cocked as if she might be choosing a zinger from her arsenal. Put this meddlesome teenager in her place.

  After a second more of staring into Buddha’s eyes, April’s face relaxed.

  “I didn’t think so,” Buddha said. “Went flying without seatbelts.”

  “My colorful young friend,” Thorn said. “Still learning her manners.”

  “It was a different era,” April said to Buddha. “We were innocent. We were young and nothing could hurt us.”

  Buddha nodded. The two women were still glaring at each other as if preparing for mortal combat.

  “Hey,” Thorn said. He felt like snapping a finger between the two women to wake them from this stare-down. But he controlled himself. One of them might bite his finger off. “How’d we go down this road?”

  “I’m happy to drop it,” April said.

  Still looking at Buddha, April raised her fist, then opened her fingers as if releasing a bird into the air.

  “Poof,” she said. “Next subject.”

  April glanced around the bar, nodded to a guy who looked like an undercover narc. Shaved head, ratty jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt smudged with grime. The woman had connections.

  “One of your sources?” Thorn said.

  “That’s Jeff, our pest control guy. This is his hangout.”

  Their drinks arrived and April had a quick sip. Keeping her eyes down.

  Thorn dredged his memory for images from that night with April. He couldn’t remember the sex, the vomiting. All he could recall was what he’d told Buddha. A flirty girl hitting on a local Keys guy, egged on by her posse. He didn’t remember a thing about that young April. This older version seemed urbane and droll, quick with acid one-liners. Spend time around April Moss, you’d always be working on the next comeback.