J. Kerley - The Memory Killer

“Nope. It’s been around for twenty-six months.”

I stared. “What? How?”

Roy put a cautionary finger to his lips and motioned us to follow him to his office. We entered and he closed his door, not a typical move for Roy.

“I had a meeting with Homeland Security yesterday, the usual trading of notes. I was telling Major Rayles about the case, that we’d had no hits from the national d-base. He said he’d have our results run through Home-Sec’s database which, it seems, is more extensive than ours.”

“More extensive how?”

“We’ll get there. The main thing is, we got a solid positive on one Gary Ocampo. Right here in Miami.”

“Particulars?”

“This Ocampo is thirty. No record. I had a couple pool dicks do some fast digging. Seems Ocampo owns a small shop, Gary’s Fantasy World, selling comic books and video games. He’s the owner of the building and resides upstairs.”

I considered the information. “No priors, Roy? A bit odd.”

“Every rapist starts somewhere, right?”

I pulled my jacket from the hanger and headed toward the door. “I’ll take a team and go fetch Mr Ocampo. Can’t argue with the genetics.”

“Hold on, Carson,” Roy said. “It’s not quite that easy. Ocampo was part of a health study at the University of Florida about three years back. The DNA was taken then, consensual, part of the study.”

I gave him a so-what? look.

He said, “Those folks at HS toss a wide net, chromosomally speaking. Sometimes the net lands in a gray area.”

“You’re saying a smart lawyer might argue though the DNA sampling was consensual, its introduction into a nationwide database wasn’t?”

Roy nodded. “I just got off the phone with the state Attorney General, wanted to know if we could bust this SOB. They promised an answer within a couple hours.”

I checked my watch. We could afford to wait if it meant the difference between a clean bust and giving some shyster ammunition to muddy a case.

“I think Gershwin and I will do some shopping until the decision comes down,” I said.

“Lemme guess,” Roy grinned. “Comic books?”

The locale was strip malls and free-standing shops, a laundromat on the corner, a pizzeria across the street. A light breeze coaxed tree-line palms into a green hula against a cerulean sky. Down the block was a fortune teller, a second-hand clothier, a storefront tacquería, a muffler shop and a uniform store. The little shops were there because the transitional nature of the street – straddling between slums and gentrification – meant low rents, but the street was a four-lane thoroughfare in and out of downtown, with ample traffic to attract customers.

Centering the block was Gary’s Fantasy World, the brightest structure on the street, freshly painted and as white as snow. A broad front window beamed with neon signage pulsing New and Vintage Comics and Video Games and Collectors Welcome. There were two upstairs windows, both with closed curtains.

Lonnie Canseco, a senior colleague, was a block behind. He’d assembled a unit of two more FCLE dicks and alerted Miami-Dade, who’d provided four patrol cars with two-man teams. Also, as a precaution, a SWAT unit was a block away. We could have gone with a major-league assault, but it was my call, and I preferred surgical strikes to carpet bombing. If that failed, I was fine with Bombs Away.

I radioed Canseco to pull down the alley behind Ocampo’s shop in case the guy bolted out the back. My phone rang, Roy. “You’re clear, bud,” he said. “The AG says it’s fine. Nail the fucker, but be careful, right?”

Gary’s Fantasy World reminded me of an old-school record store, except the wooden bins held glassine-sleeved comic books instead of vinyl albums. Hand-lettered signs hung above bins, denoting Superman, Batman, Fantastic Four and so forth. A far wall held video games. Two glass counters in the rear held more comics. I took it they were the crème de la crème, priced from two hundred and fifty to over two thousand dollars.

“Two grand for a freakin’ comic?” Gershwin whispered.

I heard a rustle and spun to see a young male enter from a door behind the counter, early twenties, skinny as a rail, with the bleached pallor that comes from junk food and avoidance of sunlight. There was a single tattoo inside his right arm: Spider-Man in lavish color. Per current trend he affected a knit woolen hat of thick yarn, black, pulled almost to his eyebrows. Unwashed brown hair poured several inches from the hat, ending in jagged spikes.

The kid’s brown eyes stared at us without saying a word. I doubt we resembled the typical comic-book purchaser, though what did I know?

“We need to see Mr Ocampo,” Gershwin said.

“He’s not in.”

I pulled the badge, evoking puzzlement from the kid. “Where is he?” I asked. “Mr Ocampo.”

The kid looked toward the ceiling. Or maybe heaven. “Upstairs.”

“Can you call him down here?”

“Gary don’t come down here a whole lot.”

A voice appeared in the air, wheezy and almost breathless. “ This is Gary Ocampo. What do you want? ”

My eyes went to the corners, the front door, back. No one.

“Where are you?” I said.

“ Jonathan just told you: I’m upstairs .”

He was talking through speakers. I looked around but couldn’t see the camera. “We need to talk to you, now, Mr Ocampo,” I said. “We need you downstairs.”

“ I can’t ,” the disembodied voice said. “ Have Jonathan take you to the elevator .”

I pulled the clerk close, figuring the store was thick with microphones. “Ocampo,” I whispered. “Is he armed, Jonathan?”

“Hunh?”

“Don’t lie to me, kid. Is Ocampo sitting on a stack of guns up there?”

The clerk looked at me like I’d started making chicken sounds. “Fuck no. Gary usually ain’t even sitting.”

“What’s that mean?” Gershwin said.

The clerk rolled his eyes and waved us through the door behind the counter and into a room of inventory, boxes of magazines and games in various stages of sorting and packaging. The kid pointed to a grated opening in the corner. “The elevator. Push ‘up’ and guess what … it takes you up.”

The scene was less threatening than odd. I keyed my mic and told Canseco and the unit we were heading upstairs, then stepped into the elevator. It wasn’t a freight elevator, but not one of those house-sized lifts either; a meter and a half square or so, big enough to carry a large fridge with a couple guys beside it. It groaned between floors and stopped behind a gray panel. Gershwin and I were pressed to the sides and had our weapons at our sides, just in case.

I slid the gray panel aside, finding a room so dark we were momentarily blinded. All I could see, backlit against the vertical bands of light between the blinds, was a pale hill constructed on a low table and for a split-second my mind showed me Richard Dreyfuss creating the mud tower in Close Encounters . At the base of the hill, against the wall, was a pair of flat-screen televisions, the screens dead.

Was the rapist hiding behind the mound … aiming a weapon at our heads?

Someone sneezed. “Ocampo?” I said, crouching in the elevator. “Where are you?”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” sighed a whining voice. “Stop your dawdling and come in.”

Stepping into the room was like entering a fog made from body stink, stale air and, for some reason, a background smell of onions. Drawing closer, the mound resolved into a rounded blue sheet atop not a low table, but a large bed. The apex of the sheet fell like a ski slope to a pudgy roll of chin. The chin rounded up into a head atop fluffy pillows.