Chapter: 1
Wait Horatio Has a Sister
Lieutenant Horatio Caine is at home one unseasonably cold, rainy spring day. It is only about 6 A.M on a Friday when he is woken by his cell phone ringing. He doesn't recognize the number. Still, something inside of him tells him to open the video message that he has just got.
The video is a bit cryptic, but he quickly understands what it is. The message contains a video file and an attachment.
The woman that was talking looks very familiar to him. Though he wracks his brain, he just can't figure out how he knows her.
She is a younger woman whose thick but straight, fiery red hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail. She had piercing ice-blue eyes that seem to be looking right through him into his soul.
The video goes on for several minutes. "My name is Renee Hope Kerrigan, and Horatio, if you are watching this video, it means that I missed my check-in. If I don't check in on my computer every 24 hours, it will send you this message. To make a long story short, I am your half-sister. I doubt that you would remember, but my birth mother was one of your teen neighbors from that New York apartment."
"She was sexually assaulted by your father. I was put up for adoption right after my birth mother committed suicide. I was adopted by a single woman who, on her death bed, gave me my original birth certificate. It says that Ronald Caine was my father. The attached file is a photograph of my original birth certificate. As soon as I found out about my possible siblings, I hired a private detective to find out who they were."
"I am so sorry to find out about my brother, Raymond, along with your wife, Marisol."
"I guess that Law enforcement must be in our blood since we all have law enforcement careers. When I found out that you were my brother, I didn't want to intrude on your life, but I moved here from South East Texas to be near the only family I had."
"I am a former United States Marine Corps K-9 trainer and handler, then Customs and Border Protection K-9 trainer and handler now I'm an MDPD K-9 trainer and handler. You and I have even worked a few missing child cases together."
"A few weeks ago my dog Echo and I helped search that Paintball course for the shooter. I think Echo growling at the suspect distracted him enough for you to shoot him dead."
When he hears the last part, he is finally able to place her. She was the canine officer who cleared the drug house after it blew up, and she helped clear the paintball facility where Piper was shot. They helped look for the suspect in Piper's mother's murder.
"I'm in trouble, and I don't trust anyone else to help me. I have had several prices put out on my head. That is the only thing that could make me turn in my commission with the Marines and leave the Border Patrol. I don't know if anyone in the MDPD had been paid off to give me up."
"Please have your team track the attached location since it is my smartwatches GPS. I'll explain everything better, I promise." The message continued.
"My dogs Echo and Charlie are in a panic room at my home. I have several prices on my head, but the price on their heads is even larger, so I put a panic room in and put them in it every night to keep them safe."
"It's fireproof and bombproof. The panic room itself is under the kitchen island. However, the lock is in the den. You will have to pull out the book (Where the Red Fern Grows) that will unlock the panic room locking panel on the kitchen island itself."
"To open the safe room, put my password in, and play the attached audio file. My password is the number address of that New York apartment where it all started. Please send someone to check on them. My canines are my best friends and my life."
Horatio looks back down at his phone's screen and notices another attachment. It contains an audio file for her panic room's voice recognition.
The video ends and leaves Horatio stunned. Quickly he calls his team as well as Dave Benton, the team's Audio Video guy, and Frank Tripp, the team's Homicide Detective. He needs all hands on deck.
His first call is his brother in law Eric Delko. He knows that he can call Eric about anything and at any time and that Eric would drop what he is doing and help him.
Horatio is not sure if Eric is staying at Calleigh's house that night, but he asks Eric not to tell her since she has her two adopted kids Austin and Patty, to get ready for school, and he knew that she would hurry over to help him. He doesn't want to worry her unnecessarily.
Since he doesn't need his entire team, he called Ryan Wolfe, Frank Tripp, and finally Dave Benton to all meet at the crime lab. He has an emergency that he needs everyone's help with, but he doesn't want to bring Natalia or Walter in on their day off unless he absolutely needs to.
It takes about thirty minutes for the four-team members that he called to get to the lab and an additional thirty minutes for Benton to trace her GPS signal.
Tripp, who is Horatio's oldest friend, wants to know what it is all about. So Horatio plays the video file for Frank. Seeing a familiar face, Tripp is both confused and amazed at the same time.
Benton traces Renee's GPS watch to a huge abandoned cannery warehouse near the port of Miami. While driving to the warehouse with Eric and Tripp, Horatio calls for an ambulance to meet them at the scene since they have a possible physical assault or worse.
Horatio and Eric knock down the door with Tripp's assistance. Carefully they follow other police officers to clear the warehouse. Some officers, including Tripp, break left, and others break right to clear the building. The pair fan out from the other officers by going straight to clear the warehouse quicker.
It takes them a few more minutes to reach a spot in the chaos of the maze-like warehouse, where the two of them have to split apart when the path goes in different directions. Horatio goes left, and Eric goes right.
Alone, Horatio finds himself deep inside the warehouse's labyrinth-like floor-plan. When he turns a corner only to be face to face with the person he was looking for. She is hanging by her wrists from a wench with her feet bound together attached to an eye screw deeply embedded into the concrete floor.
Horatio is not able to recognize this woman as the woman in the video since she was beaten beyond recognition. If it weren't for her very distinctive eye color, he would not have been able to recognize her. Renee's icy blue eyes are almost white. Her eyes are that light. The person hanging in front of him had ice blue, almost white eyes.
She is wearing just a white cotton nightie that is just torn to pieces, and it's hanging off of her tiny frame by threads. Both her nightie and she are covered in blood. Blood is dripping down her face and off of her body.
He can't help but be amazed, thinking to himself, "How the hell is she still conscious after the beating that she received."
The thought crosses his mind right as she takes a ragged breath and closes her eyes. She has stopped moving and looks like she had died.
Very carefully, Horatio reaches out to check her for a Carotid pulse since she is unresponsive and unconscious. He really doesn't think that he'll find a pulse with so much blood at the scene. Horatio placed his index finger and middle finger together over her Carotid Artery to feel for a heart rate. To his enormous relief, he feels a barely palpable heartbeat.
Her attackers made a homemade rack that was ratcheted so tight it had ripped her arms upwards towards the ceiling. The move effectively dislocated both of her shoulders.
Dislocation isn't the only thing that happened to her shoulders. She also has a through and through gunshot wound to her right shoulder.
She was beaten to within an inch of her life. It should have killed her, but she's too stubborn to die. Below Renee's body, a small pool of blood had formed, and it had already started to solidify. This is just further evidence that she has been bleeding and hanging from the wench for hours.
Horatio still has to figure out how to get her down. Down and off of the homemade rack that she is hanging from. Carefully Horatio pulls out the knife that he has in his front right pocket. He needs to cut her feet clear of the binding that kept her ankles attached to the eye screw in the concrete floor.
As Horatio is starting to cut the rope, his cell phone rang, which causes Horatio to stop cutting her down. It is Ryan Wolfe, his co-worker, who is calling.
Before Horatio had left the lab to go to the warehouse, he had Ryan run Renee's DNA that was on file with MDPD against his DNA using his father as the potential paternal link, and the results were a fifty percent match.
She is, indeed, his half-sister. Horatio was going to help this fellow officer whether or not she is his sister.
When he hears that she is related to him, his determination heightens. As carefully as he can, Horatio finished cutting her bound feet free of the screw. When her feet swing clear from the binding, Horatio needs to put his body below her so that he can support her weight as he cuts her down.
Wrapping his left arm around her small five-foot one-inch frame at her waist, he gently holds on as he cut her loose with his right hand. When she finally falls free, her body heavily slumps down over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. His sister doesn't weigh a lot, just one hundred fifteen pounds soaking wet.
As carefully as he can, he slowly starts to place his sister's body down on the cold hard concrete floor.
When he puts her lower legs to the ground, he can clearly hear the sounds of major bone on bone movement. Her legs are exceedingly swollen, so Horatio figures out that she has been hanging for hours. He couldn't no matter how much he wracked his brain figure out how many hours it would have been. Based on the amount of swelling, he knows both her lower legs are broken.
Laying her rib cage on the ground, he notices the deep black and blue bruising around her ribs, and he just knows that she has most of her ribs broken, but he can't tell the severity of the breaks. It can take days for the bruises to become visible, depending on how many blood vessels are bleeding under the skin. With massive damage, her bruises had become visible immediately.
When he prepared to lower her neck to the ground, he looks down at her forearms, where he also sees severe swelling and deduces, they too are broken badly.
Just as he places his hands on her skull, he feels the bones of her skull shift ever so slightly. Upon feeling the bones move, he just freezes in his tracks. He can't put her head down for fear that it will push a bone fragment into her brain, killing her instantly.
Horatio noticed that he didn't feel any shifting of bones when he was holding the base of her skull near the Occipital bone.
Gently holding that part of his sisters head, he just screams for help. "Eric, Frank over here, she's alive get me a medic now."
Eric and Tripp follow the sound of their boss's voice to quickly find Horatio holding the victim's head in his hands.
Horatio tells his brother-in-law and the detective the victim is his half-sister and that Ryan confirmed the link. Fearing that they will lose her before they get her to the hospital, Horatio softly speaks to her and hopes it is enough to keep her in the land of the living.
"Hold on there sister, stay with me, we have too much of life to catch up on. You are the only blood family that I have left, and family is everything to me."
With her head cradled in his left hand, he pulls out the penlight from his right front pocket since he needs to check her eyes' response to light. Having Eric open her eyes, he shines the light into his sister's eyes, looking for her reaction to light.
His heart sinks when he sees that her eyes are fixed, dilated, and unresponsive to light. He knows that that means that his sister's brain is swelling.
"Please stay with me, sweetheart help is coming," he pleas.
When the paramedics get to Horatio and his sister, she is still slipping in and out of consciousness. The medics are worried about the severity of her head trauma and the fact that Horatio felt the bones of her skull shift in his hands.
Going as fast as they can, the paramedics have to stabilize her as best as they can since Horatio refuses to let go of his sister's head for fear of killing her. As the medics get ready to load her into the ambulance, Horatio forces his way in since he still has her skull in his hands.
Eric has known Horatio since 1997, and when he thinks back, he hasn't seen his boss as scared as he was now since Eric's sister and Horatio's wife was shot.
As concerned about Renee's survival as Eric was, he can't imagine how his boss feels since to Eric, she is a victim, but to Horatio, this is his baby sister.
Watching his boss holding his sisters head in his hands, Eric lovingly tells his brother in law that he will get the police officers to secure the scene, and then he will meet Horatio at the hospital.
Eric said that all while walking beside Horatio as he runs behind the gurney holding his sister's head in his hands.
The entire drive in the ambulance Horatio holds his sister's head speaking softly and often to her. It seems to take forever to get to the hospital.