There was a bright flash of light behind me, and, somewhat startled, I turned around. Camilla Figg stood a few feet away, clutching a camera and blushing, with what seemed to be a guilty expression on her face. “Oh,” she said in her jerky mutter. “I didn’t mean the flash was on but I had to sorry.” I blinked at her for a moment, partly from the bright blast of the flash and partly because she had made no sense at all. And then one of the people stacked up at the perimeter leaned over and took a picture of the two of us staring at each other, and Camilla jerked into motion and scuttled away to a small square of grass between the walkways, where Vince Masuoka had found a footprint. She began to refocus her camera on the footprint, and I turned away.
“Nobody saw anything,” Deborah said as she materialized at my elbow, and on top of the unexpected explosion from Camilla’s flashbulb, my nerves responded instantly and I jumped as if there really was a ghost on the loose and Debs was it. As I settled back to earth she looked at me with mild surprise.
“You startled me,” I said.
“I didn’t know you could startle,” she said. She frowned and shook her head. “This thing is enough to give anybody the creeps. It’s like the most crowded public area in the city, and the guy just pops up with a body, drops it by the Torch, and drives away?”
“They found it right around dawn,” I said. “So it was dark when he dumped the body.”
“It’s never dark here,” she said. “Streetlights, all the buildings, Bayside Market, the arena a block away? Not to mention the goddamned Torch. It’s lit up twenty-four/seven.”
I looked around me. I had been here many times, day and night, and it was true that there was always a very bright spill of light from the buildings in this neighborhood. And with Bayside Marketplace right next to us and American Airlines Arena just a block away, there was even more light, more traffic, and more security. Plus the goddamned Torch, of course.
But there was also a line of trees and a relatively deserted belt of grass in the other direction, and I turned to look that way. As I did, Deborah glanced at me, frowned, and then she turned around to look, too.
Through the trees and beyond the stretch of park on the far side of the Torch, the morning sun blazed off the water of Biscayne Bay. In the middle of the near-blinding glare a large sailboat slid regally across the water toward the marina, until an even larger motor yacht powered past it and set it bobbing frantically. A half thought wobbled into my brain and I raised an arm to point; Deborah looked at me expectantly, and then, as if to signal that we really were in a cartoon, another camera flash came from the perimeter, and Deborah’s eyes went wide-open as the idea blossomed.
“Son of a bitch,” Deborah said. “The motherfucker came by boat. Of course!” She clapped her hands together and swiveled her head around until she located her partner. “Hey, Duarte!” she called. He looked up and she beckoned him to follow as she turned and hurried away toward the water.
“Glad to help,” I said as my sister raced away to the seawall. I turned to see who had taken the picture, but saw nothing except Angel with his face hovering six inches over a fascinating clump of grass, and Camilla waving to somebody standing in the crowd of gawkers who were two-deep at the yellow crime scene tape. She went over to talk to whoever it was, and I turned away and watched as my sister raced to the seawall to look for some clue that the killer had come by boat. It really did make sense; I knew very well from a great deal of happy personal experience that you can get away with almost anything on a boat, especially at night. And when I say “almost anything,” I mean much more than merely the surprising acts of athletic immodesty one sees couples performing out on the water from time to time. In the pursuit of my hobby I had done many things on my boat that narrow minds might find objectionable, and it was quite clear to me that nobody ever sees anything. Not even, apparently, a psychotic and semisupernatural killer lugging a completely limp but rather large dead cop around the Bay and then up over the seawall and into Bayfront Park.
But because this was Miami, it was at least possible that somebody had, in fact, seen something of the sort, and simply decided not to report it. Maybe they were afraid it would make them a target, or they didn’t want the police to find out they had no green card. Modern life being what it is, it was even possible that there was a really good episode of Mythbusters on TV and they wanted to watch the end. So for the next hour or so, Debs and her team went all along the seawall looking for that Certain Special Someone.
Not surprisingly—at least, not to me—they didn’t find him or her. Nobody knew nothin’; nobody saw nothin’. There was plenty of activity along the seawall, but it was morning traffic, people getting to work in one of the shops in Bayside, or on one of the tour boats tied up by the wall. None of this crowd had been keeping watch in the dark of the night. All those people had gone home to their well-earned rest, no doubt after a full night of staring anxiously into the darkness, alert for every danger—or possibly just watching TV. But Deborah dutifully collected names and telephone numbers of all the night security personnel and then came back to me and scowled, as if it was all my fault because she had found nothing and I was the one who had made her look for it.
We stood on the seawall not far from the Biscayne Pearl, one of the boats that provided tours of the city by water, and Deborah squinted along the wall toward Bayside. Then she shook her head and started to walk back toward the Torch, and I tagged along.
“Somebody saw something,” she said, and I hoped she sounded more convincing to herself than she did to me. “Had to. You can’t lug a full-grown cop onto the seawall and all the way up to the Torch and nobody sees you.”
“Freddy Krueger could,” I said.
Deborah whacked me on the upper arm, but her heart really wasn’t in it this time, and it was relatively easy for me to stop myself from screaming with pain.
“All I need,” she said, “is to have more of that supernatural bullshit going around. One of the guys actually asked Duarte if we could get a santero in here, just in case.”
I nodded. It might make sense to bring in a santero, one of Santeria’s priests, if you believed in that sort of thing, and a surprising number of Miami’s citizens did. “What did Duarte tell him??
? Deborah snorted. “He said, ‘What’s a santero?’ ”
I looked at her to see if she was kidding; every Cuban-American knew santeros. Odds were good there was at least one in his very own family. But of course, they hadn’t asked Duarte in French, and anyway, before I could pretend to get the joke and then pretend to laugh, Debs went on. “I know this guy’s a psycho, but he’s a live human being, too,” she said, and I was relatively sure she didn’t mean Duarte. “He isn’t invisible, and he didn’t teleport in and out.”
She paused by a large tree and looked up at it thoughtfully, and then turned back around the way we’d come. “Lookit this,” she said, pointing up at the tree and then back to the Pearl. “If he ties up right there by the tour boat,” she said, “he’s got cover from these trees most of the way to the Torch.”
“Not quite invisible,” I said. “But pretty close.”
“Right beside the fucking boat,” she muttered. “They had to see something.”
“Unless they were asleep,” I said.
She just shook her head and then looked toward the Torch along the line of trees as if she was aiming a rifle, and then shrugged and began to walk again. “Somebody saw something,” she repeated stubbornly. “Had to.”
We walked back to the Torch together in what would have been comfortable silence if my sister hadn’t been so obviously distracted. The medical examiner was just finishing up with Officer Gunther’s body when we got there. He shook his head at Debs to indicate that he’d found nothing interesting.
“Do we know where Gunther had lunch?” I asked Deborah. She stared at me as if I had suggested we should strip naked and jog down Biscayne Boulevard.
“Lunch, Debs,” I said patiently. “Like maybe Mexican food?”
The light came on and she lurched over to the ME. “I want stomach contents from the autopsy,” I heard her say. “See if he ate any tacos recently.” Oddly enough, the ME looked at her without surprise, but I suppose if you have worked with corpses and cops in Miami long enough you are very hard to surprise, and a request to search for tacos in a dead officer’s stomach was mere routine. The ME just nodded wearily, and Deborah stalked off to talk to Duarte, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs and think deep thoughts.