J. Kerley - The Death File - A gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist

Castle rolled his eyes. “Meaning?”

Novarro stared at a black vulture circling against a blue sky. Somehow the bastards always knew.

“I’ll get there when I get there.”

The nameplate on my door said, Carson Ryder, Investigative Consultant, Senior Status . The title was an invention of my boss at the Florida Center for Law Enforcement. Being a “consultant” got me out of the stultifying barrage of administrative meetings and other make-work tasks associated with any bureaucracy, even one headed by the bureaucrat-averse Roy McDermott. “Senior status” pretty much allowed me to do whatever I wished, as long as the end result was a better, safer Florida.

On my first day, Roy had said, “I don’t really care what my people do, Carson. All I ask is that it stay within legal bounds and lets me stamp ‘Case Closed’ on a shitload of files.”

So far, I hadn’t let him down.

Outside my twenty-third story window lay the jagged and glittering skyline of Miami, the gemlike turquoise blue of Biscayne Bay in the distance. I was unable to appreciate the beauty, sitting at my desk and filling out reports, grumbling that for all my status bought me, I still had to do paperwork just like a beat cop in Mobile, Alabama, which is how I started.

My phone rang – mobile, not landline – telling me I probably knew the caller, which I did: Vince Delmara, a top homicide detective with the Miami-Dade County PD. We had been friends since my first case for the FCLE, almost three years ago. Vince was old-school, the best aspects at least, believing that experience, hunches, and shoe leather were what solved cases.

And sometimes just plain dumb luck.

“Question, Carson …” Vince said, jumping right in. “You still seeing that shrink in Miami Beach … Dr Angela Bowers?”

I threw my pencil to the desk and leaned back. “What you talking about, Vince?”

“You see a lot of crazy bullshit,” Vince said sotto voce, like sharing a secret. “It’s all right to visit a therapist. Anyway, I ain’t gonna tell no one.”

“Right now, I’m thinking I’m not the one needs a shrink, bud.”

A sigh. “You’re really not seeing a psychologist, are you, Carson?”

“I think I scare them. You got a point here, Vince?”

“I got a problem. You busy, or can you meet up?”

Five minutes later I slipped on a blue linen sport jacket to cover the shoulder rig, dusted eraser rubber from my blue jeans, and headed out, hoping paperwork faeries slipped in to finish my drudgery.

The offices of the Florida Center for Law Enforcement were on floors twenty-two and twenty-three of Miami’s towering downtown Clark Center, the upper location for administrators and top investigators, the lower floor for mid-echelon investigators and support staff. On the way to the elevator I stuck my head into a small office being painted and prepped by a maintenance staffer: dropcloths on half the floor, a ladder, a couple cans of paint.

A painter was crouched in a corner and painting the floor molding.

“The guy who was here …?” I said.

The painter frowned. “He left. Said I was whistling out of tune.”

I continued to a conference room and looked through the glass window to see fellow investigator, Lonnie Canseco, meeting with a pair of forensics accountants from the Tallahassee office. Cold: Not what I was looking for. Onward to a smaller conference room, this one with an FCLE operations manual on the round table, the empty pushed-back chair hung with a purple blazer, size 44 long.

Getting warmer.

I jogged back to the painting-in-progress office, checked for a gray canvas bag beside the desk. Not there, which meant I was warmer still. I took the back staircase to the floor below and pushed through a metal door, entering another door to the rear and smelling sweat and body heat. Angling past a partition I looked across a white-tiled expanse to see the black expanse of Harry Nautilus, pulling on his pants beside a naked white guy.

Hot. I turned to the nude guy, Larry Vincente. “How long was it, Larry?”

Vincente grinned from earlobe to earlobe. “Almost nine.”

I shot a thumbs-up as Vincente shut off the shower nozzle and stepped to a rack to grab a towel. Like most pool investigators Vincente spent about a dozen hours a day working cases and the FCLE’s small gym was a place to grab a quick, stress-reducing workout: a half-dozen strength machines, plus stationary bikes and treadmills. Vincente tried to get in six treadmill miles a day, but today had managed nearly nine – either a slow day or a fast run.

“Let’s boogie, amigo,” I said to Harry, now dressed and cramming sweaty shorts and tee into the gray gym bag. “It’s time to meet Vince Delmara.”

Harry splashed on a palmful of 4711 cologne, light and floral and antithetical to the wet heat of a South Florida summer. “Delmara? The Miami detective who’s afraid of the sun.”

I made a biting gesture. “It’s the vampire in him.”

“Can’t wait.”

Ten minutes later we were racing toward Coral Gables in my moss-green Range Rover Defender. Fully equipped for a safari, it rode hard, ate gas, had a manual transmission prone to sticking, and the AC wasn’t quite up to the Miami heat, but if a case ever took me to the African veldt, I was ready.

“You say this thing belonged to a drug lord?” Harry yelled above the siren as we blew down I-95.

“Confiscated. I found it in the motor pool.”

“When you gonna paint it with a roller?”

Harry was referring to my former ride back in Mobile, a battered pickup I’d repainted gray with ship paint and a roller. He knew because three years ago he was my partner at the Mobile, Alabama, PD; the man who’d convinced me to join the force when I was living on my mother’s slim inheritance and wondering what to do with a psychology degree gained by interviewing every imprisoned maniac in the South.

We’d been the Harry and Carson Show for over a decade and last year a truly odd quirk of Fate had brought us together again, him on a case from Mobile, me on one in Florida. The cases converged and became one. After we’d closed it, Roy offered Harry a position with the FCLE. Harry finished out his time with the Mobile PD and had made the move just two weeks ago.

“I’m keeping the green,” I said. “It’s such a cheerful color.”

Coral Gables is about six miles from downtown and we made the trip in five minutes. We pulled into the palm-canopied drive, seeing two MDPD cruisers plus a command vehicle, and vans from the ME’s office and scene techs.

“Here we go, Cars,” Harry said. “My first Miami crime scene.”

We strung our IDs around our necks and entered the home, a celebration of pastels: yellows, blues, corals; an uplifting color scheme and très Miami. Vince Delmara, whose spirits didn’t appear lifted, was conversing with a scene tech on the corner, the three-inch bill of Vince’s black fedora projecting past his nose, but not by much. Vince wore a cobalt suit and white shirt, his only concession to color a lavender silk tie. Harry and I went over for introductions.

They shook hands as Vince’s major-league beak probed the air around Harry. “Jeee-sus, something smells great.”

“I shaved and showered before we left HQ,” Harry said.

“You set a high bar,” Vince said. “I try to remember to wash my hands after pissing.”

Vince led us into the house, a flurry of activity, scene techs dusting for latents, vacuuming the carpet, studying doors and windows for signs of entry.

“Who’s the vic?” I asked as we followed Vince to the side of the house. A young tech, Darla Brady, followed with a plastic evidence bag in her hand.