Going Dark(90)
He reached into a brown paper sack and came out with a human arm. Small, slender, with a camouflage rubber bracelet around the wrist. He held it out, offering it to Sheffield. “Prints have been lifted, forensics done. You can handle it if you like.”
Frank took the arm. It was fashioned from some kind of synthetic rubberized material. Had the weight and the feel of a real arm. The fingers were lifelike, nails and all. Not a mannequin, something much more realistic.
“There’s an ID stamp on the stump,” the security man said. “Forensics did some calls, traced it to a local TV production company. They’re shooting some crime show here in Miami. It’s one of their props. Somebody reported it missing a few months ago.”
The hippie asked Frank if he knew anything about the arm, but before Frank could answer, his office phone rang.
The security hippie picked it up, listened, then held it out to Frank. “A message from a Mr. Juan Medira. Urgent.”
“Building-code inspector. Probably my septic tank runneth over.” Frank took the phone, smiled at the humorless suits filling his room. “This better be good,” he said to Marta.
“Oh, no, this is bad. This is very bad.”
When she finished, Frank handed the phone back to Miles Shuster. Frank’s head was swimming. The room was ten degrees warmer and his face felt as if it had begun to slowly inflate.
“Is there a problem?” Shuster said.
Sheffield stood up. Jaw tight, grinding his teeth as he went from face to face. Sizing up this bunch of office dwellers who were deciding his fate and the fate of his field agents, these twerps insulated in the upper-floor offices, knowing nothing about the street, about kicking in doors, taking down an island full of bombmakers and assorted radicals in the total dark, the middle of a tropical storm.
“Yeah, a problem,” Frank said. “That was Juan Medira, he’s a building-code inspector for Miami-Dade. I’m doing some construction at my place so Juan’s around a lot. He stopped by a few minutes ago to inspect some roof tile I installed, and he found a corpse on my front porch.”
Nobody gasped, nobody did much of anything. As if corpses were someone else’s department.
“I hope it wasn’t somebody you know.”
“I knew him, but not very well. Agent Magnuson.”
That got an eyebrow lift or two, some sideways glances, and a few looks of consternation.
“Must have been suicide,” the security man said.
The others murmured in agreement. Self-righteous pricks, proud of their power to intimidate and destroy.
“No,” Frank said. “Magnuson was electrocuted. Looks like he walked into a booby trap intended for me.”
* * *
Sheffield sat at his concrete picnic table, watching the Miami-Dade homicide detectives and ID techs working alongside his own forensics team, taking photos of Magnuson’s twisted body with the burns and blisters on his right hand and arm and some kind of evil rash on his face, while other cops were still interviewing Juan Medira over by the swimming pool.
Yellow crime-scene tape was strung from palm tree to palm tree. Cops going in and out of 106, all the usual state-of-the-art science, which had produced nothing at Marcus Bendell’s house and would produce nothing here. Some greasy substance had been found on the doorknob, probably electro gel from the same tube as that found on the ladder at Bendell’s.
First time in Silver Sands’ long and not always stellar history there’d been crime-scene tape and cops parading around the place. His Eden was tainted. He wouldn’t be stretching out in his bed tonight in 106. Or anytime soon.
From the start there’d been a killer floating around the edges of this ELF operation. A straight line from Marcus Bendell to Zach Magnuson. Was it an ecoterrorist? Leslie Levine? He doubted it. More likely the guy who rigged this trap was somebody who thought Frank was getting too close to discovering something. Which was nice to hear because he didn’t feel close to solving anything. The Bendell murder? Leslie Levine’s disappearance? The cartoon elf on the Turkey Point computer system? The software bomb? The Chee brothers? The guy that blew up the water pipeline in the Keys?
This case had been scrambled from the minute Nicole picked him up last week, drove him down to Turkey Point.
Sheffield tried it again, running through the last few days, the step-by-step replay of everything case-related since Nicole showed up, from Marcus Bendell’s electrocution to this electrocution, looking for the thread that had to be there, wishing he had his yellow legal pad so he could draw connecting lines between events. Then going back again to Nicole, the drive down to Turkey Point, the meeting with Sheen and Sellers, the whole force-on-force thing.