“Deborah,” I said, “what the hell are we doing?”
“One more minute with that brain-dead bag of muscles and I’m going to lose it,” she said. “I gotta get out of here.” She tried to pull away, but I held on.
“I am as willing as anyone to flee in terror from your partner,” I said. “But we are going to find somebody and we don’t know his full name or where he might be. So where are we going?”
She tried again to jerk her arm away from my grip, and this time she succeeded. “Cybercafé,” she said. “I’m not stupid.” Apparently I was, because once again I was playing follow the leader as she stormed out the door and into the parking lot.
“You’re paying for coffee,” I said rather feebly as I hurried after.
There was an Internet café only about ten blocks away, and so in no time at all I was sitting at a keyboard with a very good cup of coffee and an impatient Deborah fidgeting at my elbow. My sister is an excellent shot with a pistol, and no doubt has many other sterling character traits, but putting her in front of a computer is like asking a donkey to do the polka, and she very wisely left all her Googling to me. “All right,” I said. “I can search for the name ‘Vlad,’ but—”
“Cosmetic dentistry,” she snapped. “Don’t be an asshole.”
I nodded; it was the smart move, but after all, she was the trained investigator. Within minutes I had a list of dozens of dentists in the Miami area, all of whom practiced cosmetic dentistry. “Shall I print it out?” I said to Debs. She looked at the long list and chewed on her lip so hard I thought she might well need a dentist herself soon.
“No,” she said, grabbing for her cell phone. “I got an idea.”
It must have been a very secret idea, because she didn’t tell it to me, but she called a number she had on speed dial and in just a few seconds I heard her say, “This is Morgan. Gimme the number for that forensic dentist.” She scribbled a hand in the air, indicating that she wanted a pen, and I found one beside the keyboard and passed it to her, along with a scrap of paper from the nearby trash can. “Yeah,” she said. “Dr. Gutmann, that’s the guy. Uh-huh.” She wrote the number down and disconnected.
She immediately punched in the number she’d written down and after a minute of talking to a receptionist and then, judging by the way she began to tap her toe, listening to elevator music, Gutmann came on the line. “Dr. Gutmann,” Deborah said. “This is Sergeant Morgan. I need the name of a local dentist who might sharpen a guy’s teeth so he looks like a vampire.” Gutmann said something and Deborah looked surprised. She scrabbled for the pen and wrote as she said, “Uh-huh. Got it, thanks,” and then flipped the phone closed. “He said there’s only one dentist in town stupid enough to do that. Dr. Lonoff on South Beach.”
I found it quickly on the page of dentists I had called up on the computer. “Just off Lincoln Road,” I said.
Deborah was already out of her chair and moving toward the door. “Come on,” she said, and once again Dutiful Dexter lurched up and followed along.
TWELVE
DR. LONOFF’S OFFICE WAS ON THE FIRST FLOOR OF A RELATIVELY old two-story building on a side street two blocks from Lincoln Road Mall. The building was one of those semi-Deco buildings South Beach had once been infested with, and it had been nicely restored and painted a very light lime green. Deborah and I went in past a sculpture that looked like a geometry lesson having sex in a hardware bin and we walked straight to the back, where a door announced, DR. J. LONOFF, DDS: COSMETIC DENTISTRY.
“I think this is it,” I said, trying to sound like David Caruso.
Deborah just gave me a quick and mean look and opened the door.
The receptionist was a very thin African-American man with a shaved head and dozens of piercings in his ears, eyebrows, and nose. He was wearing raspberry-colored scrubs and a gold necklace. A sign on his desk said, LLOYD. He looked up as we entered, smiled brightly, and said, “Hi! Can I help you?” in a way that sounded like, Let’s start the party!
Deborah held up her badge and said, “I’m Sergeant Morgan, Miami-Dade Police. I need to see Dr. Lonoff.”
Lloyd’s smile got even bigger. “He’s with a patient right now. Can you wait just a couple of minutes?”
“No,” Deborah said. “I need to see him now.”
Lloyd looked a bit uncertain, but he didn’t stop smiling. His teeth were large, very white, and perfectly shaped. If Dr. Lonoff had done Lloyd’s teeth, he did really good work. “Can you tell me what this is about?” he said.
“It’s about me coming back with a warrant to look at his drug register if he isn’t out here in thirty seconds,” Deborah said.
Lloyd licked his lips, hesitated for two seconds, and then got to his feet. “I’ll tell him you’re here,” he said, and he vanished around a curved wall and into the back of the office.
Dr. Lonoff beat the thirty-second deadline by a full two seconds. He came huffing around the curved wall, wiping his hands on a paper towel and looking frazzled. “What the hell are you—What’s this about my drug register?”
Deborah just watched him as he skidded to a stop in front of her. He seemed young for a dentist, maybe thirty, and in all honesty he looked a little too buff, too, as though he had been pumping iron when he should have been filling cavities.
Deborah must have thought so, too. She looked him over from head to toe and said, “Are you Dr. Lonoff?”
“Yes, I am,” he said, still a little huffish. “Who the hell are you?”
Once again Deborah held up her badge. “Sergeant Morgan, Miami-Dade Police. I need to ask you about one of your patients.”
“What you need to do,” he said with a great deal of medical authority, “is to stop playing storm trooper and tell me what this is about. I have a patient in the chair.”