Chapter 7
After leaving Wolfe to his phone calls that Monday morning, Horatio continued the rounds of his team. His next stop was to talk to Calleigh. She handed him information on the bullets from the convenience store robbery. The proud smile she gave as she did this always gave him the feeling he was her teacher receiving her latest work for some school class. One of these days, he was going to bring a marking pen and scrawl a large A on it and hand it back to her. He knew she'd get the joke. Meanwhile, she told him how far she'd gotten on finding more information about the nurse that Simon had mentioned. Hearing how he'd missed Simon's visit that morning and that she had the photo of the nurse firmly in her possession, Horatio gave her a smile. She concluded with saying that her next step was to go back to the Everglades Rest Home to show the photo and see if anyone recognized him.
"Would you like me to come with you when you go to the nursing home?"
He could see her considering what could possibly happen at the home that she'd require help with. "Not unless you're just dying for a road trip. I have a feeling that this is our man, and he's gone." She flicked a finger at the photo beside the bullet comparison microscope. "If this is him, he's followed the same pattern as before. He killed as many people as he could until someone got suspicious."
"So, you think he might have changed his identity?"
Calleigh's gentle Southern accent faded away. "I think so. I have a feeling we're dealing with a guy who came to Miami for more than just the sunshine. I'm thinking he knew about the document mills here that serve the illegal immigrant population. I'm also thinking he's a psychopath that's one smart cookie. He's planning to go on playing Angel of Death. The best way to do it is to have a stack of different IDs."
"You think he's also upping the ante." Horatio's whispering deep voice dropped as his awareness increased as to what this dangerous killer might be up to.
"I think there's every possibility he needs to increase the rate of kills. Killers don't kill less as time goes on."
"When do you intend to go and verify if this is the man?" He nodded at the picture of the dark haired man staring out of the photo.
Calleigh was removing her lab jacket as she spoke. "Now, since I've given you the report on the bullets. I'll call for a couple of uniforms to come with me. If we're lucky, I'll bring him back in a couple of hours. If not, I'll at least know whether he's the man and what name he's been using."
"I think I'll take some of this information down to Sally Brandt. She might have some thoughts on what this man could be capable of."
She nodded thoughtfully and said, "Anything would help."
The two walked to the elevator together. Riding down, Horatio casually asked about Calleigh's father. As he got off on the first floor, she'd just finished telling him about her dad's latest success in getting another child away from an abusive parent. Calling out just as the doors closed at his departing back, she said, "When I get back, I'll find you." Hearing words he'd used so often tossed casually at him, Horatio couldn't help but smile. He knew he didn't have to turn around to show her.
Horatio didn't mean to pause outside the door to the psychologist's office, but he did for a split second. Microscopically observant, even of his own actions, he almost smiled, and shook his head. No wonder he thought twice about going in. He'd known this woman for all of four days and each of the three encounters had left him bewildered in one way or another. He couldn't help but be unsure what would confront him next.
This time, he found Sally sitting quietly at the desk facing the door. Laying a finger on what she'd been reading, she raised her mop head and seeing him, smiled and closed the folder in front of her. The bright ceiling lights overhead somehow softened the effect of her blue-white eyes.
"Hey, Horatio. What brings you into the cubbyhole?" This time both her smile and her voice showed pleasure at his entry.
Before he could answer, she rose and motioned at him. "Come on around, and have a seat." She indicated the two easy chairs and a short couch set around an oval table in the area behind the desk. She slid into the wine colored chair that sported six inch wide wings springing from either side of the backrest. Sitting sideways, she gathered up her feet under her khaki skirt.
Waiting until he chose the armless chair on the opposite end of the table, she dropped her chin onto her hand, her elbow on the arm of the chair. "I bet you're just dying of curiosity about what I was up to last Saturday night, aren't you? I'm really sorry I didn't get back to you. By the way, you really do clean up nice." She drew out the last word, deepening her voice as she did.
Caught off guard again, not sure where to go with her assumptions or compliments, Horatio leaned back and crossed his long legs. "Uhmm, thank you." He waited to see where this was going to go.
Paying no attention to his pause, Sally continued. "You're welcome. Yeah, I've been showing up as a fairy character at these shindigs for about three years now. It seems to go with my appearance and sort of fits into all sorts of themes. I love working with the guests at the center, too. It's all privately funded, you know, not one dime comes from the government. Of course, backing by local organizations like the Miami-Dade Police Department is the key. But, I've heard that you've donated quite a bit for them so I don't need to sell the idea to you, do I. We try to get the members, the young adults we take care of, involved as much as possible but we also have to supervise them. These events can easily get to be overwhelming for them. To help them get into the spirit of it all, we all dress up in costumes."
"I left about midnight. Did you stay to give the appropriate closing speech at the end of the evening?" Horatio's eyes crinkled.
"Oh, you mean the one, "'If we spirits have offended…'"
Horatio chimed in and both said together, "'…think but this and all is mended, that you have but slumbered here, whilst these visions did appear…'"
Both stopped at the same time and smiled at each other at seeing each knew Shakespeare.
Sally continued, "No, I didn't. You didn't miss a thing."
Horatio's eyebrows tilted up while he nodded. "I see."
After a moment's silence, Horatio began again, "I also came in here on that business you'd brought up last week." He leaned forward, setting both feet on the floor.
It was Sally's turn to be quiet.
Horatio explained what he and Frank Tripp had done to follow up on Marky Samson's three year old murder. Ending with the reaction of both the young men to the questioning, describing their deadpan expressions, he concluded, "So, for the moment, at least, we've come to another dead end."
Sally sat still, looking like she was intently reading a large invisible book in front of her. Her ice-pale eyes were directed downward and they switched quickly from side to side. Finally she looked up, "Their reaction to the questioning could mean a lot of things. I'd say that two kids, so different, several years apart in age, one not even active with the same group, having the same response, is the more telling. Whoever drilled them on what to say really pressured them, and not in a nice way; so much so, it stuck with them for this long. Could it have been one of the directors of the center? Perhaps a volunteer?"
Horatio nodded. "The current director of the facility wasn't there three and a half years ago. He couldn't help. According to the athletics coach who was there, volunteers at these places come and go. Finding one volunteer to pin anything to would be a trick."
Sally shrugged. "Well, whoever it is, he's still active some place in the same area. Those crimes are still going on. If you find anyone you like, call me. I'll watch when you interview him and tell you if he matches anything I've come up with."
When the man with the slightly bemused look in front of her didn't reply but sat quietly, staring down at the end of the table, Sally said, "Ahem."
Horatio hadn't realized he didn't answer her comment about wanting him to call her; he'd merely sat, smiling at the thought of more interactions with this lady. Coming to at her prompt, lifting his blue-eyed gaze to meet her pastel stare, he said, "I also have another case on hand now that I hoped you had some thoughts on." His voice purred gently across the space between them.
Pale as Sally's eyes were, Horatio couldn't help but catch the enlargement of her pupils, which he attributed to an interest in the subject. Perceptive as he was, however, he didn't catch the slight deepening of color on her lips, which was an indicator of an entirely different reaction.
He went on to explain what he knew of Danny Donnelly and what had happened at The Everglades Rest Home. Finally, he concluded with Calleigh's findings on Danny's current whereabouts or lack thereof.
Sally's initial remarks, after he'd finished, were posed in such a way that she seemed to be verifying some information. Little did the lieutenant know that she hadn't been paying attention to the first part of Donnelly's description. She had rather been enjoying the delightful contrast of Horatio's expressive brows to his eye color, had watched his large hands move, as they added color and depth to his words.
Horatio elaborated. "We've verified the bounty hunter's findings. Donnelly's nursing career started in his hometown in eastern Ohio. After two years, he'd moved to across the river to western Pennsylvania to work in a senior care facility. A year and a half later, he was up in a small town in Maine, and a year after that in Wyoming and then he went to Kansas City. He was in Kansas City for only a few weeks before he went to Ponca City. In each case, within two months previous to his departures, there were three to five deaths. In each of the cases, because death in nursing homes isn't all that remarkable, no one questioned the clusters."
Sally dropped her feet to the floor, unconsciously reflecting Horatio's position, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees "But something happened in Ponca City. Somebody got suspicious and he was arrested. So, why was he released?"
"His lawyer got him releasedon a technicality of some sort. I'm betting the arresting officers didn't have their ducks in a row. Here's Donnelly, an experienced nurse, but he's the new kid on the block. When something goes wrong in any small organization, it's the newest that gets blamed. In a small town, the police are close to their community, they're protecting their friends; don't look at them as just citizens. When a friend pointed to a stranger and said 'he did it', they listened. However, they were limited by lack of resources to identify evidence. The police there had basically jumped the gun. Once he was out they lost track of him because they had limited resources. He simply left." Horatio shook his head. He knew too well the importance of funding to a police department.
Sally nodded in sympathy. "So, he got caught, wriggled out, and fled. Apparently, this detective was able to track the guy. He found that maybe he came to Miami. You think these victims of drug overdose are his work."
Horatio nodded. "We think so. This guy seems to be hooked on killing the elderly. To continue doing this, he can't be a fugitive. Hospitals are hungry for nurses and don't question a new resource too hard, but a criminal record would be too much, even for them."
Her small hands gesturing to help form the ideas she was developing, Sally jumped in, "He has to immediately start the killing spree again. He needs the rush more and more often."
Horatio paused and looked up from the mental diagram he'd been laying out in front of him. "So, what's his next move? Best guess?"
As if examining the imaginary map of the crime Horatio had drawn, Sally leaned forward to stare at the table. She was completely unaware that, as she did, her scoop-neck blouse opened up allowing a clear view of chest and beyond. Only her bra saved her modesty.
Before Horatio could politely tear his eyes away from the intriguing sight, she sat up and leaned against the high backed chair, one hand to her mouth, the other at rest on the leather arm, drumming bare fingertips.
Finally, she said, "Two possibilities from what you've told me so far. One, he's followed his previous pattern and may have moved on to another state. Two, nearly getting caught, twice, has added a new thrill to an old game; he's still around here, at another nursing home, wondering how many victims it's going to take before anyone notices this time."
"It'll take too many." Horatio rose from his seat looking like a thunderhead cloud, dark and threatening. "But he's in for a surprise if I have anything to say about it.
As he left the small office, he pulled his phone from his pocket and hit speed dial. Before the door closed behind him, Sally heard him say, "Calleigh. I just got some interesting information on Donnelly. As you suspected, the clock is ticking. I hope you have some good news for me."
Calleigh did have some news; several people at The Everglades recognized the picture she'd showed them. They'd identified him as Nurse Mark Primus, a licensed vocational nurse, LVN. He'd had been hired four months previously, but hadn't been seen since the announcement of the lawsuit against them.
Not recognizing his name from the records she'd examined, Calleigh had also inquired about his role in the dead patients' care. She talked to the head nurse who ran that floor during the time Mark worked. The nurse remembered him as being an unusually helpful staff member, always willing to lend a hand with patients. He had often volunteered to take over to let a fellow nurse leave early or get a few extra minutes for break. Why, once, he'd even done it for her, taking over just as she was going to administer some pain meds. He took the needle and put it into the patient's arm and sent her to her break to take a load off her tired old feet.
After telling Calleigh what Sally had told him, Horatio congratulated her on thinking up just the right questions at the nursing home. "We've got a face now, so let's make use of it."
Calleigh, who had been returning to the lab when she got his call, closed her phone as she walked up behind Horatio and said, "I'm going to pull up a list of every elder care nursing facility in a fifty mile radius and fax them a copy of the picture."
Horatio was always pleased when one of his old tricks was turned on him. Pocketing his phone and turning to face her he answered, "Include sending a copy downstairs and to every precinct office in the same area."
"I'll do that while I'm looking up the numbers for the elder care places."
Horatio's pocket chirped quietly. Before he could answer, Calleigh spun around and walked off without another word.
"Horatio."
Ten minutes later, he was observing Ryan through two leaded glass walls. Hazmat had determined that the insides of this brown and tan jug of early 1900's origin had been lined with radium ore. Even though, according to the hazmat people, the danger of the radiation from the jug was minimal, the lab had been warned not to take chances. Radium has a half-life of several thousand years so the insides of the ninety-year old jug were no doubt as toxic as the day it was made. Within the room, Ryan was clad, as he'd promised, in a lead-lined head to toe suit and even wore a heavy helmet with a small plate at eyelevel for viewing.
He moved ponderously and carefully around the nearly two-foot tall pottery crock set on the lab table. First, he picked up the magnetic wand and waved it over the small dish of bright red powder. The dust adhered to the wand's end forming a bushy looking head of crimson. Holding the wand clumsily in a heavily gloved fist, he then waved the hairy stick carefully over the jug's uneven surface. The broad flat lid to the jar had been laid to the side. The corked spigot stuck in the bunghole near the bottom of the jug hung over the edge of the table. The dust on the wand adhered to the variety of fingerprints on brown and tan coloring.
Ryan, always curious, had gone online earlier to find out why anyone would line a water jug with radium. He first found that radium paint was used extensively in the early 20th Century for making the hands and numbers of watches and aircraft gauge dials visible in the dark. Radium itself, however, was also thought to be beneficial to health. Dilutions of the radioactive material were used in everything from toothpaste to hair gel, even in women's makeup. The use of it was all the rage in the poorly lit speakeasies of the Prohibition Age.
But, it was the health industry that made the most widespread use of it. Several companies either fired water crocks with radium ore infused into the plain clay or even just painted the insides of the finished crocks with radium paint. They sold them with the claims that drinking six to eight glasses of the water kept overnight in the jug would cure everything from sexual dysfunction to the common cold. It was only when women who had painted those watch faces (they'd been encouraged to use their lips and tongues to keep the tips of the camel hair brushes used to apply the paint, sharp and clean) in the early 1900's, began dying in the mid-1920's of bone cancer, laryngeal cancer, throat and even stomach cancers, a suspicion of toxicity arose. Finally, someone realized that direct ingestion of radium wasn't a good thing. By the mid-1930's the craze for applying and drinking radium-impregnated material was over, though many people suffered from the results of having done so for several decades after. Only a few of these jugs or pots had survived as curiosities in various museums. At least, until now.
"We still have to find out why these things are popping up here," Wolfe had announced as he stepped into the suit. He knew there wasn't a whole lot of chance there'd be anyone's fingerprints on this jug but those of Victoria or Vicki, but they had to try. If they were lucky, some other print would still be on it, leading perhaps to whoever had given the jar to Victoria.
Horatio watched as the suited figure dusted the entire outer surface of the jug. Then Ryan had the more difficult task of managing the tape to pick the revealed prints. Ordinarily, this kind of job would take perhaps half and hour to forty-five minutes to complete; this time, though, he wasn't shrugging, sweat soaked, out of the suit, until an hour and a half later. Before he'd left the room, he'd placed the pot back into the lead lined box it had been brought in.
Before he took the plastic leaves of fingerprints to be run through AFIS, Horatio gave Ryan one of his rare 'Man! Isn't it amazing what we do!' grins. He gave a shrugged half smile in return.
TBC
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