some shouting and raving, which Paz did not allow to affect him, he took Vargas through his day, in English. He’d worked the morning (he was in real estate, office in Coral Gables) and then gone out for a spin in the boat (a big Bayliner, docked behind the house). Then he’d had supper with his wife (here he broke down briefly) and picked up a trio of heavy investors at the Biltmore in the Gables and driven them up to Joe Robbie Stadium for the game, using his firm’s skybox. He wouldn’t have gone off with his wife just about to have a baby had it not been a major deal. He had called her on his cell phone during the seventh-inning stretch, about eight-fifty. She had been fine. The game was over at nine-twenty, he had dropped his clients at their hotel, making excuses when they invited him for drinks. He had hurried home, arriving just past ten, and found … Another breakdown.
Now there was a bustle outside the living room, voices raised. It was the family, the famous Cuban family? Vargas’s father, mother, two sisters, their husbands, the victim’s father. By the book, Paz should have isolated all these people and interviewed them separately, but it was so hideously clear that this thing wasn’t a domestic that he let them come in for a shrieking-and-comfort-fest with Alex Vargas. He did not, however, avoid a dirty look from the victim’s father, and an angry spurt of Spanish to his son-in-law?”That’s the detective? What, we don’t pay enough taxes, they stick you with a nigger?”
Paz went out through the rear of the house, through the French doors that led to a broad terrace, which included a long lit-up pool and a little palm-thatched bar. He stood and breathed salt-scented air until his gut stopped roiling. He didn’t really blame the gusanos, who were hopeless; he blamed himself for still, still, after all these years, letting it get to him.
He walked off the terrace out onto the dock, and determined that no one was lurking in the Bayliner, nor had the murderer left any obvious clues on it. Beyond the boat there was nothing but the dark bay and beyond that the lights of Key Biscayne. There were cops all around the place kneeling, squatting, looking for evidence. Paz did not think they would find much.
He checked out the other two houses on the cul-de-sac. One was closed up for the summer. The other was occupied by a frightened family who had seen and heard nothing. No cars, no boats. They would have heard. They asked Paz what had happened, and Paz told them they were investigating a homicide. Paz agreed with them that it was awful for something like this to happen in a neighborhood as nice as this one.
As Paz arrived back at the Vargas house, he was buttonholed by Arnie Mendes. The homicide chief was a burly man, of the size and shape characteristic of football tackles, with a broad, humorous, fleshy face decorated by a brush mustache and sideburns. Mendes was not a Cuban at all, but a third-generation Spaniard, who barely spoke the language. His people had come over from Segovia in 1894 to roll cigars. His name, however, had clinched him the job.
“Solve it yet, Jimmy?”
“Yes, sir. We’re pretty sure it was a mentally retarded itinerant Negro person. I’m just about to drive along under the expressway and pick him up out of his refrigerator carton. I’m sure he’ll confess.”
“It may come to that,” said Mendes, laughing. “Do you have any idea who these people are?” He gestured broadly to the house and grounds.
“Rich Cubans?”
“You could say that. The husband’s daddy is Ignacio Vargas. Owns the Southeast Company. You’ve seen their ads?”
“Developers.”
“Gigantic fucking developers, hence dear friends of every politician in the state. The dead girl’s father is Hector Guzman, the founder and president of Hemisphere Bank, which is that great big black glass thing on Brickell. What they call a dynastic marriage, and the little heir to it all is lying in that fucking yellow bathroom with his head sliced open. As of this moment, the total detective resources of the Miami PD are on this case and will remain on it until it goes down, or we give up hope of putting it down, in which case all of us will be looking for employment. So what do you have for me?”
“Boss, we just got here. We haven’t got an autopsy yet, we haven’t looked at the crime-scene stuff …”
“I mean is it what it looks like?”
Paz paused. Of course the man would’ve already spoken with Cletis. So Paz said, “What it looks like, subject to revision, is a ritual murder similar in all obvious respects to the murder of Deandra Wallace and her unborn baby. That means a ritual serial killer, and this guy is very smart, very sneaky, and he seems to move around without anyone seeing him.”
“A black, I understand. I mean seriously.”
“There are some indications, Chief.”
“Perfect. The icing on the cake. Cletis tell you we’re bringing the Bureau in?”
“Yes, sir.” In a perfectly flat tone.
“Yeah, you’re as enthusiastic as I am, but the boss and the mayor want them in on it. As far as I’m concerned, they can advise, but you and Cletis are the point guys on this business. I want you to understand you have my total support. You can absolutely count on me.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“Right. Up to the point where you fuck up or it becomes politically inconvenient to support you, in which case you’re both shit-canned.”
Paz couldn’t help smiling. “Please, sir, I don’t need a pep talk. Give it to me straight.”
Mendes smiled, too, but Paz knew he was serious. A bright man, and honest according to his lights, but ambitious as Lucifer. He leaned forward a little, placing his head a little closer to Paz’s face. “Okay, you said ritual killings. Did you mean something like a psychotic ritual or a ritual from some actual cult?”
“Unclear, at the moment. There’s some kind of African connection, with African fortune-telling, in the Wallace case. And I’ve got people checking to see whether the situation, the pregnant woman, the cuts, the parts taken from the corpses, the drugs involved, are connected to anything in the anthropological record. I was just going to get with the family and ask them if the vic had any interest in that stuff.”
“Yeah, well, why don’t you let Cletis handle that end of things,” said the homicide chief.
“Any particular reason for that?” asked Paz, an edge in his voice. “My interview technique not quite polished enough?”
“Oh, fuck it, man!” the chief snapped. “The whole fucking department knows you have a beef with upper- class Cubanos. You just let the preacher talk with the family, and you find something else useful to do. Supervise the goddamn canvass. This guy must’ve got here somehow, and every one of these fucking piles has a guard dog and a proximity alarm. People must have heard something. Oh, and Jimmy? You’re both off all other unrelated cases, off the chart entirely. And you’ll both report directly to me on this one, from now on, until further notice.”
“What about Lieutenant Posada?”
“You let me worry about Posada. We’ll need a high-level liaison with the Bureau, and that ought to be right up Romeo’s alley.”
“Yes, sir,” said Paz, and walked off to find the patrol sergeant in charge of the local canvass.
So the hours passed. Paz kept busy, interviewing cops, interviewing neighbors who had told the cops he interviewed that they might have seen something, talking to the crime-scene guys, in hopes of picking up something obvious, some lead besides a tiny piece of fractured black glass. The results were thin. Two people walking dogs on Cocoplum Boulevard had seen a man go by on a bike at about the right time, but the guy was white, with blond hair. Nobody closer to the murder scene had seen this person. The crime-scene techs had picked up some grains of soil off the rug near the French windows leading to the terrace and there was an indentation from a bike tire in the dirt under one of the big palms that lined the driveway. Hooray, a clue. The CSU people took a plaster impression.
At about midnight, Paz decided to pass on some of the misery and called Manny Echiverra at home, told him what had happened, and suggested that it would be a smart career move for him to get down to the morgue and autopsy Mrs. Vargas, forgetting about normal procedure and schedules or any other bureaucrap, because he was the pathologist who had done the work on Deandra and did he want someone to maybe miss a significant similarity? And blame it on him?
He had just folded away the cell phone when a familiar voice said, “I hope you’re not avoiding me.” He turned to see Doris Taylor standing there in her famous grass-green pantsuit.
“Can’t talk to you now,” he said, covertly looking around to see if anyone was observing them together. “Also,
