“I have been, Clair.”
“Think harder.”
I looked up to see a fat white moon in a cobalt sky, low enough to be enhanced by the atmospheric lens, its light broken into diamonds atop waves shivering across the three-acre cove behind my home. It would be a beautiful night if I knew my brother was safe.
I’d not heard from Jeremy in seven weeks. Though I’d once gone a year without word from my brother, he was then twenty-five and in an institute for the criminally insane, imprisoned for the murders of five women and I, ashamed, didn’t visit the institution for twelve months. He’d also been belatedly indicted for killing our father, who he tied to a tree and disassembled with a kitchen knife; I had just turned ten at the time, Jeremy was sixteen.
Jeremy spent almost a decade in incarceration until the director of the institute, Dr Evangeline Prowse, broke every rule in her life and profession by sneaking Jeremy to New York. In a bizarre twist of fate – since those knowing Jeremy Ridgecliff was my brother were countable on one hand – I, Detective Carson Ryder, having a record of apprehending psychotics, was summoned to either catch him or kill him.
During the journey I discovered my brother’s role in the women’s murders was ambiguous, and not deserving of death or life-long incarceration, and I helped Jeremy elude the police, a breach of my professional oath that troubled my conscience to this day. Jeremy’s killing of our father likely saved my life, and troubled my conscience not the slightest.
After his disappearance in New York, I again had no contact with Jeremy for over a year, until he called from an isolated rural community in Eastern Kentucky, where he’d assumed the identity of a retired Canadian psychologist named Auguste Charpentier, living in a well-appointed cabin and growing wealthy using an unorthodox analysis of the stock market. Since he’d surfaced, we’d communicated enough that I knew something was amiss if he’d gone this long without acknowledging my calls, texts, and e-mails.
I also knew that nothing good had ever come of my brother spending too much time alone with his thoughts.
Call me, Jeremy, I thought, one final time, adding You thoughtless bastard.
The phone lay dead and I glanced at my watch; four minutes past midnight. I checked the beer bottle on the table beside my deck chair; empty. Both indicated it was time to totter to bed. I took another look at the moon and whistled. Mr Mix-up, my huge pooch, ran up from hunting crabs in the sandy backyard. I yawned and scratched his head and we headed inside.
As I latched the door my cell phone trilled the opening riff of Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom”. My heart paused mid-beat: Had I conjured up my wayward brother? I checked the screen and frowned – Roy McDermott, my boss at the Florida Center for Law Enforcement.
“Carson, it’s Roy,” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
Roy always identified himself, as though I could forget any voice attached to a ceaselessly grinning jack-o’-lantern face topped by a hay-bright shock of unruly hair, an untamable cowlick floating above like antennae.
“I’m sitting on the deck and enjoying the moon, Roy,” I semi-lied. “What’s going on?”
“Viv Morningstar just called. She was looking for you, but couldn’t find your number.”
Dr Vivian Morningstar was the Chief Forensic Pathologist for Florida’s southern region. We’d worked together several times and I’d found her as attractive as she was professional. I’d made a few attempts at flirtation, but her eyes had told me I was dancing in the wrong ballroom.
“What does the Doc want, Roy?”
“She’d like you to meet her at MD-Gen first thing in the a.m. It involves a poisoning.”
MD-Gen was Miami-Dade General Hospital, Dade being the county. A hospital – with its emphasis on the living – seemed a bit far afield for the forensic pathologist.
“She doesn’t want me at the morgue?”
A chuckle. “It’s Viv, Carson. She basically ordered me to send you to MD-Gen.”
Vivian Morningstar on a case was like Patton on the march … all ahead full, damn the bombs and bureaucrats. Her staff revered her, but tempered their love with terror.
“And you told her …?” I said.
“Only that I’d pass the message on. Say hello to the moon for me.”
I awoke an hour before my 6.00 a.m. alarm and jumped through the shower, pulling on jeans and a blue Oxford shirt, grabbing a coral linen jacket to keep the shoulder-holstered Glock from startling citizens at stop lights.
I went beneath my home, stilted to ride above storm surges, and climbed into a fully outfitted Land Rover Defender originally confiscated in a drug bust. Colleagues called me Sahib and Bwana, but having the only veldt-ready copmobile in the country, I laughed it off.
I turned on to Highway 1. An hour and two coffee stops later I entered Miami-Dade General and elevatored to a room in the Intensive Care section. Doc Morningstar was leaning against the wall and studying reports, her dark and shoulder-length hair fallen forward. She was slender and athletic and appeared taller than her five ten, the effect of improbably long legs currently hidden under khaki slacks. Her blouse was a silky purple, the sleeves rolled to her elbows, her only ornamentation a pair of small enameled earrings, purple coneflowers to match the blouse.
Morningstar glanced up, brushed back the errant hair, and nodded, any potential smile damped by the patient centering the room, a young man, late teens to early twenties, blond, with sunken and lifeless eyes and flesh so pale as to seem blue. A mask covered his nose and mouth, so many tubes and hoses running to the mask it appeared a mechanical octopus was clinging to his face.
I gave the doc a What’s-up? look.
“Name’s Dale Kemp,” she said quietly. “Hikers found him three days ago near the Pahayokee overlook in the Glades. He’s been raped, semen found, but nothing in the database.”
DNA sampling used to take weeks, but recent technology made it a matter of hours with one of the new machines, and we’d recently added one to our arsenal. But if there was no match for the perp in the database, it was still a dead end.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
Morningstar set aside the reports. Her eyes were huge and the kind of hazel that seems pale one moment, dark the next.
“An overdose seemed indicated, but nothing showed. The attending physician, Dr Philip Costa, knew I had a sub-specialty in toxicology and called yesterday. I suggested a more complex series of tests, initially thinking scopolamine or atropine, and my preliminary tests found a massive quantity of datura stramonium in his blood, among other things.”
“Datur-strama … what?”
“You might know its plant source: Jimson weed.”
My mental Rolodex whirred. “Also called Loco weed?”
She nodded. “I also found robitin, a phytotoxin from Robinia pseudocacia, or black locust tree. When it’s ingested by animals, they become stupefied, unable to recognize their surroundings. They often die.”
“Jeee-sus,” I said.
“There’s probably more in this crazy cocktail, Ryder. But the datura and robinia seem the main components.”
“What’s the effect of the Loco weed?”
“In controlled quantities, datura has medicinal uses. Larger doses create delirium and fearful hallucinations. It can result in odd behavior, such as stripping off clothes, picking at oneself, staring into space.