De Silva took them up an elevator, then down a labyrinth of cramped hallways. Turns out, his offer of an office was sarcastic. His desk was one of many in a detective’s bull pen, which was only slightly less cacophonous than the lobby they’d left behind. Once there, he shunted them into a tiny, windowless conference room that looked like it might have been a converted broom closet.
“Sorry about the accommodations,” he said. “I’m sure Uncle Sam takes care of you Federals just fine, but us lowly city cops consider it a good day if the AC stays on. Now, what can I do for you?”
Thompson tamped down her irritation at De Silva’s tone. Friction with local law enforcement was part and parcel of working for the Bureau-and anyway, she reminded herself, it was Garfield who kicked off this particular pissing contest. She tried a smile. In her current exhausted state, it came out a grimace, and likely did more harm than good.
“I was wondering what you could tell us about the Cruz murder,” she said.
“I assume you read my report.”
Garfield snorted. “If that’s what you wanna call it,” he said.
Thompson glared at him. De Silva bristled. “What’re you trying to say, Agent?”
Garfield leaned back in his chair and showed De Silva his palms. “Just that it was a little slight, is all.”
“Through no fault of mine, pal, I can assure you. We traced the shot back to a vehicle, and the vehicle back to a long-term airport parking lot. The owner was at some kinda conference in Reno and had no idea it was even missing. The Crime Scene guys tell me the interior of the vehicle was a bust for prints and DNA, on account of our perp bleached the living shit out of it and wiped down all the surfaces he touched-including his shell casings and gun. And, yeah-the rifle was left behind, but its serial was filed off, so no luck there, either. Somehow every security camera for blocks around went down hours before the shooting, so we’ve got no footage of either the shot or Cruz getting hit, and eyewitnesses were no better. Edgar Morales, the owner of the building, is hiding behind a wall of lawyers- we can’t get a straight answer as to whether he was even in the country when the shit went down. We spent hours canvassing the area, and the best we could come up with was a valet for the hotel the shooter’s car was parked at who said our suspect was, and I quote, ‘a white dude, maybe, in a ball cap, aviators, and a bushy beard.’ That beard, by the way, was fake-we found it bleached white in the center console. And when we called around to costume shops in town trying to find out where he got it, we rolled a donut. We worked the trail. The trail ran cold. As simple as that. Whoever killed Cruz knew what he was doing-and my guess is, he’s long-ass gone by now.”
“Look, Detective, we appreciate your efforts,” Thompson said, flashing a glance at Garfield, “and I’m sure my partner didn’t mean to imply your investigation was anything less than thorough and professional. In fact, your expertise could prove invaluable to us. If you’d be willing to take us out and walk us through the crime scene, maybe help us track down some known associates of the vic-”
But De Silva cut her off. “Listen, lady, much as I’d just love to drop everything and help you out, the Cruz case ain’t exactly a priority. This whole goddamn state’s a war zone. In Miami-Dade alone, we’ve had fifty-four murders so far this year. Three hundred cases of sexual assault. Well over two thousand aggravated assaults. A full third of those cases haven’t been cleared yet. Most likely, they never will be. If I had to guess, I’d say your so-called vic Cruz was responsible for a handful of each, so to my thinking, whoever whacked him did me and the decent citizens of this city a favor. You want to poke around, that’s your business. But if you want to stand here and gripe that the file’s a little thin, feel free to fill it out yourself. I got better things to spend my time on.”
De Silva stood, yanking open the conference room door. It slammed against the wall, rattling glass. Then he left, red-faced and fuming.
Thompson fumed as well. If Garfield had played it differently, maybe De Silva would have been more cooperative. She eyed her new partner with distaste, but if Garfield noticed, he sure didn’t let on. Instead, he smiled and shook his head, saying to Thompson, “Some fucking detective he was. Probably couldn’t find his own dick with both hands and a flashlight.”
“Ass,” Thompson called him.
“Excuse me?” Garfield replied.
Thompson stared at him a sec, an expression of blank innocence honed in many a late-night poker game pasted on her face. And then she said, “What? That’s the saying. Couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight.”
“Right,” said Garfield, somewhat mollified. “Now whaddaya say we go take a look at that crime scene?”
8
Engelmann, comfortable despite Miami’s heat in a linen suit and woven cowhide loafers, sipped his espresso and watched the two federal agents bicker in the shadow of the Morales Incorporated Building. From his table at a sidewalk café across the street, he’d watched them parade up and down this stretch of Brickell Avenue for the better part of the afternoon, alternately examining the scant physical evidence Cruz’s murder had left behind, and sniping at each other like an embittered married couple.
Engelmann spent most of his life observing from a distance. Even as a child, he’d felt set apart from his family, from other children, and from the string of governesses in whose care his parents placed him-and whose emotional states he slowly destroyed with his sadistic manipulations. It was by impulse, rather than design, that he tormented them-an omnipresent itch that he could never truly scratch, an urge to ruin and destroy that could be quieted but never quelled.
It wasn’t until he discovered killing that he’d felt truly present in this world.
His first was a pheasant at his family’s summer manor, which was nestled in the Inn River Valley in southwest Switzerland. He was ten. The house chef mistook his interest in the process as culinary in nature, and after he’d observed a slaughter without crying, the chef allowed the boy to bleed a bird himself. In that blissful moment when knife parted flesh, and the headless pheasant began to thrash within his grasp, the air had never seemed so crisp, the sky never quite so true a blue. But if the wizened old chef took note of his aroused state-as Engelmann suspected he had, for Anatole never again allowed the boy to partake in the daily slaughter-he never breathed a word of it to anyone.
Engelmann’s path had nevertheless been determined. So transformative was the experience, young Engelmann spent the better part of that afternoon traipsing about with hands coated red, only grudgingly washing away the stains when they’d crusted dry, the blood’s color fading to rust- and with it, the colors of the world around him. As he watched those flecks of spent iron swirl downstream on the icy waters of the River Inn, he knew they represented the compass by which his heart had been set-a conclusion reinforced weeks later when he took his first human victim, a local farm boy, and experienced an emotional and physical release so thunderous that mere words failed to do it justice.
Today, he watched, as he’d watched the village children decades before, his mind calm and appraising. Of course, he had no intention of harming these investigators. Not that he wouldn’t have enjoyed it. The woman was pretty enough, he thought, or at least would be if she gave a damn, and the man had a certain swagger it might be fun to break him of. But he didn’t see any utility in it-nor did he expect that they’d discern anything from the crime scene he had not yet himself discerned. He’d arrived in Miami some hours before they did and had already been over every centimeter of the sidewalk and the parking lot, so he knew just how meticulous the hit had been. He elected to stay and watch them not for evidentiary reasons, but because he believed the better he understood his fellow hunters, the better he would understand their common quarry.