The Death Box(5)

Phoning a gate, I thought. Welcome to the Third Millennium.

I aimed toward the mainland, an hour away, cruised through Key Largo and across the big bridge. My destination was nearby, a bit shy of Homestead. Roy had said to turn right at a sign saying FUTURE SITE OF PLANTATION POINT, A NEW ADVENTURE IN SHOPPING and head a quarter mile down a gravel road.

“You can’t miss the place,” he’d added. “It’s the only circus tent in miles.”





3





It wasn’t a circus tent in the distance, but it was side-show size, bright white against scrubby land scarred by heavy equipment, three Cat ’dozers and a grader sitting idle beside a house-sized pile of uprooted trees. Plastic-ribboned stakes marked future roads and foundations as the early stages of a construction project.

A Florida Highway Patrol cruiser was slanted across the road, a slab-shouldered trooper leaning on the trunk with arms crossed and black aviators tracking my approach. He snapped from the car like elastic, a hand up in the universal symbol for Halt, and I rolled down my window with driver’s license in hand. “I’m Carson Ryder, here at the request of Captain Roy McDermott.”

The eyes measured the gap between a top dog in the FCLE and a guy driving a battered pickup. He checked a clipboard and hid his surprise at finding my name.

“Cap’n McDermott’s in the tent, Mr Ryder. Please park behind it.”

It felt strange that my only identification was a driver’s license. I’d had my MPD gold for a decade, flashed it hundreds of times. I’d twice handed it away when suspended, twice had it returned. I’d once been holding it in my left hand while my right hand shot a man dead; his gamble, his loss. It felt strange and foreign to not produce my Mobile shield.

You made the right decision, my head said. My heart still wasn’t sure.

I angled five hundred feet down a slender dirt road scraped through the brush, stopping behind the tent, one of those rental jobs used for weddings and whatnot, maybe sixty feet long and forty wide. I was happy to see a portable AC unit pumping air inside. On the far side, beside a house-sized mound of freshly dug earth, were a half-dozen official-looking vehicles including a large black step van which I figured belonged to the Medical Examiner or Forensics department.

Beside the van three men and a woman were clustered in conversation. Cops. Don’t ask how I knew, but I always did. A dozen feet away a younger guy was sitting atop a car hood looking bored. I wasn’t sure about him.

The entrance was a plastic door with a handmade sign yelling ADMITTANCE BY CLEARED PERSONNEL ONLY!!! the ONLY underscored twice. Though I hadn’t been cleared – whatever that meant – I’d been called, so I pressed through the door.

It was cool inside and smelled of damp sand. Centering the space was a pit about twenty feet by twenty. Above the pit, at the far end of the tent at ground level, were several folding tables. A woman in a lab coat was labeling bags atop two of the tables. Another table held a small microscope and centrifuge. I’d seen this before, an on-site forensics processing center.

I returned my attention to the pit, which resembled the excavation for an in-ground swimming pool, wooden rails keeping the sandy soil from caving. Centering the hole was an eight-foot-tall column with two lab-jacketed workers ticking on its surface with hammers. I estimated the column’s diameter at five feet and watched as a white-smocked lab worker dropped a chipped-off shard into an evidence bag. When the worker stepped away, a photographer jumped in. The scene reminded me of a movie where scientists examine a mysterious object from the heavens. Shortly thereafter, of course, the object begins to glow and hum and everyone gets zapped by death beams.

“You there!” a voice yelled. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

I snapped from my alien fantasy to see a lab-jacketed woman striding toward me, her black hair tucked beneath a blue ball cap and her eyes a human version of death beams. “Where’s your ID?” she demanded, pointing at a naked space on my chest where I assumed an identification should reside. “You can’t be here without an—”

“Yo, Morningstar!” a voice cut in. “Don’t kill him, he’s on our side.”

I looked up and saw Roy McDermott step from the far side of the column. The woman’s thumb jerked at me.

“Him? This?”

“He’s the new guy I told you about.”

The woman I now knew as Morningstar turned big brown death rays on Roy. “I’m in charge of scene, Roy. I want everyone to have a site ID.”

Roy patted dust from his hands as he approached, a luminous grin on his huge round face and the ever-present cowlick rising from the crown of semi-tamed haybright hair. He called to mind an insane Jack O’Lantern.