Cari Mora Read online

  Dr. Holly Bing was teaching a small class of future medical examiners from across the country and Canada. They were gathered around the headless body of a man wearing swim flippers. The subject was in the anatomical position and cooled to thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit.

  Dr. Bing wore a lab apron over black, her trousers bloused in jump boots with the airborne lace. She is Asian American, in her thirties. She has a comely face and not a lot of patience.

  “You have a white Latin male, physically fit and in his twenties,” Dr. Bing said. “He floated up yesterday afternoon beside the topless cheeseburger boat off Haulover Beach. Marine Patrol caught the squeal. The body’s fairly fresh but hard used, as you can see. He has an appendectomy scar on the lower right quadrant and a tattoo on his left forearm, USMC globe and anchor with ‘Semper Fidelis.’ Time of death is recent, maybe two days, but he’s been gnawed by crabs and shrimp. What’s one thing you want to know determining time of death?” She did not wait for an answer. “Water temperature at Haulover, right? Eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit. Later we’ll talk about how to figure degree days underwater. His fingers are missing, as you see. He was about five feet, ten inches tall when he was all there.”

  “What did they cut his head off with, Dr. Bing?” The question came from a fresh-faced young man standing at the neck end of the body.

  “See where the saw buzzed through the center of the third cervical vertebra?” Dr. Bing said. “Tooth pitch is right for a Sawzall, six teeth per inch—the usual thing. Sawzall’s gaining in popularity for dismemberments in the U.S., it’s a solid number two—ahead of the chainsaw and behind the machete. In this case he was elevated on a table or a counter, or the tailgate of a pickup, head hanging forward. He was dead when they cut his head and fingers off. How would you know that? Look on the lab results—the serotonin and histamine levels are not raised in those wounds. Same with the abdominal punctures, done to keep him from gassing up and floating too soon. See the difference in the finger amputations? One finger was sawed off with the Sawzall, the others pinched off with a lopper in the traditional manner. There’s a gunshot wound in the thigh, through and through, and I got a slug that was lodged in the pelvis.

  “Cause of death?” Dr. Bing said. “Not beheading. Nope, the cause of death is a thoracic puncture wound, through and through. Entry through the left scapular, skewered the heart, exited just inside the left nipple.” Dr. Bing touched the chest beside an oblong exit hole with two small holes beside it. Her nails showed red through her gloves as she pressed the chest beside the blue holes. “Somebody want to tell me what did this? Anybody?”

  “Stippling?” a student said.

  “No,” Dr. Bing said. “I told you it’s an exit wound. Detective Robles, what would you say made this hole and these two little holes?”

  “An arrow, maybe a crossbow bolt. A fishing arrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the arrow went through and through and when the line tightened and pulled the arrow back, the arrow twisted a little and the barbs dug into his chest. Might be an expandable broadhead. Be good to check the dive shops.”

  “Thank you. Class, this is Detective Sergeant Terry Robles, Miami-Dade Homicide. He has seen this before, along with everything else people do to each other.”

  “Have you got the arrow?” said the young man at the end of the table.

  “No,” Holly Bing said, “and what does that tell you about the circumstances?”

  When no student answered she looked to Robles.

  “They had the time to take it out,” Robles said.

  “Yes, the killer had time and privacy to pull it out. From the shape of the entrance wound I’d say they did not pull it on through. They probably unscrewed the arrowhead from the shaft and pulled the shaft out of his back. They had some privacy to do that.”

  Dr. Bing sent the class to the lounge for the break. She and Robles stayed in the laboratory.

  “I got DNA to Quantico but it’s going to be a few days,” Holly Bing said. “Jesus, you can wait a month on a rape kit. The slug’s maybe a nine-point match—a .223 one-to-nine right-hand twist, sixty-six grains, maybe a civilian AR-15. It’s a boat tail bullet, maybe subsonic.”

  “You left the swim fins on him.”

  “Yes, but I looked under them before the class came in.”

  Holly took off one flipper. On the sole of the foot was tattooed “GS O+.”

  “‘Grupo sanguíneo,’ his blood type,” Robles said.

  Holly took off the other flipper. “I thought you might want to see this before it gets around,” she said. On the sole of the foot was a tattoo, a bell suspended from a fishhook.

  “Terry, why would he have the tattoo on the bottom of his foot? If it’s not visible, it’s no protection in jail. Not like a neck tattoo.”

  “That one is good for bail money from a shark,” Robles said. “Or it’s good for a lawyer’s time, some lawyers. Lawyers that spend a lot of time around the jail. That’s a Ten Bells tattoo. Thank you, Holly.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Nightfall at the boatyard on the Miami River. Leaning palms rustled in the wind. A small freighter passed with tugs fore and aft pulling like terriers to make the turns.

  Captain Marco and two of his crewmen stood with old Benito before the open door of the incinerator. A big fire was burning inside it. Firelight and shadow leaped around the dark boatyard. Second Mate Ignacio wore a stained wifebeater.

  “Ignacio, put on your shirt,” Captain Marco said.

  Ignacio pulled a polo shirt over his head. Inside his bicep was the tattoo of a bell hanging from a fishhook. Ignacio kissed a St. Dismas medal on his neck chain.

  In the middle of the flames, between big toothy fish skulls, Antonio’s head looked out at them. It still wore the scuba mask, eyes staring out as the rubber melted around the glass. The black Gothic cross earring was missing, ripped from his earlobe.

  Cari Mora came out of the shadows and stood beside Benito.

  She carried a branch of orange jasmine. She stood with the men and looked unblinking into the incinerator. She put the branch of jasmine into the fire to partly screen Antonio’s ruined face.

  Benito threw accelerant on the fire. Sparks and flames shot out the chimney.

  The fire was red on their faces.

  Captain Marco’s eyes were wet. His voice was steady. “Glorious St. Dismas, patron of penitent thieves, you accompanied Christ in the harrowing of hell. Now see our brother safely to heaven.”

  Benito closed the incinerator door. It was much darker without the firelight. Cari looked at the beaten earth of the boatyard. It was just like the beaten earth she had seen in another place, before she came to the United States of America.

  “Do you need anything?” Marco asked Cari.

  “A box of .40 caliber S&Ws would be good,” she said.

  “You got to do something about that gun,” Marco said. “Pitch it.”

  “No.”

  “Then trade with me for another one,” Marco said. “Benito, could your nephew do the barrel and breechface?”

  “Better do the extractor and the firing pin too,” Benito said. He held his hand out for the gun.

  “We’ll give it back to you, Cari,” Marco said. “Cari, you need to cooperate, you know. I am jefe here.”

  Jefe, like Antonio was jefe. I should have covered him from under the dock.

  Marco was still talking to her. “Were your prints on the brass—did you load the clip?”

  “No.”

  “You left the brass at the scene.”

  “Yes.” She handed the gun to Benito.

  “Thank you, Cari.” Marco got her another Sig Sauer from the boatyard office and a box of cartridges. The gun was a .357. That was okay.

  Marco spoke close to her ear.

  “Cari, do you want to work with us?”

  Cari shook her head. “You won’t see me anymore.”

  From the darkness, a signal whistle. Captain Marco and the others we
re alert to it.

  Detective Sergeant Terry Robles got out of his car. He could see the sparks from the incinerator rising above the boatyard. He walked into the boatyard between high stacks of crab traps. A high-pitched whistle on the wind, and the bloodred dot of a laser sight appeared on the front of his shirt. Robles stopped. He held up his ID wallet, open with the badge showing.

  A voice from the darkness: “Alto! Stop.”

  “Terry Robles, Miami PD. Take the laser off me. Take it off now.”

  Captain Marco raised his hand and the laser dot moved off Robles’s chest and winked on the badge held above his head.

  Captain Marco faced Robles in the passage between the stacked traps.

  “Don’t they make you give back the tin when you’re on injured reserve?” Marco said.

  “No,” Robles said. “It stays with you, like a Ten Bells tattoo.”

  “Actually I’m glad to see you,” Marco said. “No, ‘glad’ is too strong a word, excuse my English. I am ‘not sorry’ to see you. Not yet anyway. Do you want a drink?”

  “Yes,” Robles said.

  Under the open shed, Captain Marco poured two shots of rum. They did not bother with the lime.

  Only Captain Marco was visible to Robles, but he could sense others out there in the dark. Robles itched a little between his shoulder blades.

  “I have a dead body with a Ten Bells tattoo. You probably know who it is,” Robles said.

  Captain Marco spread his hands. Another freighter slid by on the river with tugs at the bow and stern. The thud of the engines made them raise their voices.

  “A young Latin man, twenties,” Robles said. “In good shape, wearing swim fins. We don’t have his head or his fingers. The tattoo is on the bottom of his foot. And his blood type too, written with the G.S.—grupo sanguíneo—O positive.”

  “How did he die?”

  “An arrow or a crossbow bolt through his heart. He went out fast, if that concerns you. It wasn’t an interrogation. He died before his fingers were cut off.”

  Robles could see nothing in Marco’s face.

  “One of the slugs in him matches a bullet taken from my house,” Robles said.

  “Aiiiiii. That.”

  “That,” Robles said.

  A moth flew around the bare lightbulb, its shadow crossing both of them.

  “I want you to know this,” Marco said. “On my mother’s soul, we did not know the man who shot at your house. I would not shoot into your home any more than you would shoot into mine. Everyone is very sorry about what happened to your señora.”

  “A lot of people will shoot into a home. And they shoot young men wearing flippers. Are you missing a kid?”

  A thump from inside the incinerator, where Antonio’s brain was boiling. A swirl of sparks out the chimney.

  “My crew is fine,” Captain Marco said.

  “I want the shooter on the kid and I want the gun and I want the place the gun came from. You and I are okay now. If I find out you know and didn’t tell me, we won’t be okay.”

  “You know I have been legit for a long time. But I saw someone important at a family gathering, a First Communion in Cartagena a month ago.”

  “Don Ernesto.”

  “We will say an important person.”

  “Does he know where the gun came from?”

  “No, and he wants to say it to your face. If this person ever came to Miami, would you meet him face-to-face?” Marco said.

  “Face-to-face. Anytime, anyplace.” Robles nodded thanks for his drink and walked away down the dark path between the piles of traps and crates. The laser dot trailed over the ground behind him.

  “That will be about next Tuesday, I think,” Marco said to himself.

  A puff from the incinerator. Antonio’s head blew up and a smoke ring glittering with sparks rose from the chimney like a dark halo.

  Marco hoped the police would not identify Antonio soon because the cops would then start working Antonio’s pool customer route.

  Chapter Twenty

  On the third day of Antonio’s absence from work, and with his truck unaccounted for, the pool service company reported Antonio missing. A BOLO alert issued on his truck had been in effect only two hours when the truck was found at the strip mall.

  A fellow worker, holding an ice pack against her throat, looked at the medical examiner’s video and identified Antonio’s tattoos.

  When Hans-Peter Schneider saw Antonio’s identity on the news he knew time was short. The police would be working Antonio’s customer list.

  Hans-Peter had watched and waited for two days. He spent the time replacing the men he had lost. He had lost two men, not counting Felix. He had only Mateo left.

  Hans-Peter preferred an ethnic and language mix in his crews. He believed this made it more unlikely that the crew would scheme against him.

  At a whorehouse and novelty store off Interstate 95 he looked up Finn Carter, a burglar handy with tools who had worked for him before. Finn Carter jumped a little when he saw Hans-Peter, but Finn was fresh off serving a nickel at Union Correctional, Raiford, and open to any proposition. The other was Flaco Nuñez, a body-and-fender man and chop-shop operator from Immokalee with two convictions for domestic violence. Flaco used to be a bouncer at Hans-Peter’s bars before the health department shut them down.

  When the police did not come to the Escobar house, Hans-Peter went back to work.

  Carter was grinding along with Flaco.

  Hans-Peter Schneider watched from the basement stairs. He was wearing Antonio’s black Gothic cross earring, and thought it gave him a certain dash.

  He said nothing to his new employees about the possibility of explosives. Jesús could be lying, who knew?

  It is not possible to have a subterranean basement in Miami Beach, as the water table is too high. A true basement would either fill with water or float your house. To stay above tidal surges in a hurricane, the Escobar house was elevated on pilings, as was the patio, and the whole surrounded by added dirt. So its basement room, though surrounded by earth, was high enough not to flood except in the king tides.

  Carter and Flaco had scraped away the cement from the basement wall to reveal the landward face of the steel cube. A vault door was set into the cube and the entire front face was painted with the vivid larger-than-life-size image of Our Lady of Charity, Nuestra Señora de Caridad del Cobre, patroness of Cuba, and of boatmen. There was no dial or keyhole on the vault door, only a small handle that did not turn.

  Carter put an eight percent cobalt bit into his heavy electric drill and coated the cutting tip with black oxide. To get 220 volts they had to run the cord down the stairs from behind the kitchen stove.

  Carter crossed himself before he pressed the drill against the breast of the image and squeezed the trigger. Noise and only a small curl of metal.

  Hans-Peter considered. He winced at the sound of the drill. His lashless eyelids half closed. He heard in his mind the voice of Jesús Villarreal: The Lady has an explosive temper.

  He had to yell to stop Carter. He went out into the garden to make a telephone call. He waited three minutes for an answer. Hans-Peter heard the gasp of the respirator before the thin voice of Jesús Villarreal in Barranquilla, Colombia, came on the line.

  “Jesús, it is time for you to earn the money I have sent you,” Schneider said.

  “Señor Schneider, it is time for you to send the rest of the money I have earned,” Jesús said.

  “I have a vault door.”

  “To which I guided you.”

  “There is no dial, only a small handle. Should I open it?”

  A gasp and a pause and the thin voice came again. “It is locked.”

  “Should I force it open?”

  “Not if you wish to remain in this world.”

  “Then advise me, my old and good friend Jesús.”

  “The arrival of funds will stimulate my memory.”

  “Danger is everywhere and time is short,” Schneider said.
“You want to provide for your family. I want to protect my men. What threatens one also threatens the other—is your mind clear enough to follow that?”

  “My mind is clear enough to count money. This is a simple matter: Pay what you said you would pay and do it now.” Jesús had to stop for several breaths and suck oxygen. “Others might be more generous. Meanwhile I would not disturb Nuestra Señora de Caridad del Cobre, my good friend Señor Schneider.” The line went dead.

  Schneider reached behind the kitchen stove and unplugged the power cord to the big drill. He went down the stairs and told his men, “We have to wait, or take it out in one piece. We have to take it someplace where we can work on it. It’s a big block of steel, Carter. We need privacy.”

  The television news at noon repeated Antonio’s identity and put the police tip line number on the screen.

  Schneider called Clyde Hopper in Fort Lauderdale. Hopper did marine construction and had a lucrative sideline in destroying historic houses for developers in Miami.

  It is notoriously difficult to obtain demolition permits for historic houses in Miami and Miami Beach. A developer might wait weeks or months for a permit to cut down the old oak trees on a property and knock down a historic house.

  Clyde Hopper’s Hitachi double-front demolition machine could reduce a house to a pile of rubble in a few hours on Sunday when the building inspector was home with the wife and kids.

  The machine had a pack of trash bags by the driver’s seat for nests and nestlings and all the animal dwellings that come down with a tree.

  When the destruction was discovered, the historical society would bleat and the contractor would be fined maybe $125,000—considered a popcorn fart compared to the cost of waiting for a permit, with the bankers perched on the roof like buzzards.

  But it was Hopper’s barge-mounted fifty-ton winch and crane that Hans-Peter wanted. He mentioned a sum to Clyde Hopper. Then he mentioned a second sum, and a meeting was set.