Rolling Thunder (23 page)

Handy. Especially if your bloody scuffs are on a shower stall wall.

“Six bottles of Kiwi, all empty. Four bottles of Stride Rite, one still half full.”

“Any receipt in the bag?” asks Ceepak.

“No, sir. Just this.”

“What?”

The tech forceps a crisp white rectangle out of the plastic bag.

“A business card. Big Paddy O'Malley, Shore 2 B Fun Enterprises. Lists an address on Ocean Avenue.”

“He dropped a calling card into the bag?” says Botzong incredulously.

“It's possible someone is attempting to frame Mr. O'Malley,” says Ceepak.

“Yeah. Either that, or this guy is the dumbest killer in history.” The lead detective turns to a young blonde in a blue windbreaker. “Okay, Reiss. Hit all the local shoe stores, drug stores, Kmarts and Wal-Marts. Anybody who might have this much white shoe polish on hand. Somebody buys a dozen bottles, maybe a cashier remembers them. If they do, Bunny, dig for security tapes.”

“Will do,” says the CSI named Bunny Reiss. She heads out the front door and, yes, hops into her sedan at the end of the driveway.

That's when I see Sean O'Malley parked out front in the street.

“Ceepak?” I say. “Sean's back.”

“Then let's go have a word with him, Danny—let these folks do their jobs.”

“Yeah.” I'm already strolling out the door.

Something about smug n' chubby Sean has rubbed me the wrong way since grade school. Okay,
everything
about him. As we head down the walkway, I can hear the radio blaring inside his car. Cliff Skeete and WAVY.

“Nine forty-five in sunny, funderful Sea Haven on WAVY, the crazy wave of sound for Sea Haven and the shore, and we're just fifteen minutes away from thunder rolling across the sky.” The crowd whoops a whoo-hoo in the background. “Hey, if you want to ride the thunder and feel the rumble of Sea Haven's first all-wood roller coaster, you need to hurry on down. The place is packed—”

Sean clicks off his radio. Smirks at us.

“What the dilly yo, po-po?”

“Why are you here again, Mr. O'Malley?” asks Ceepak.

He shrugs. “Yo, didn't you hear the man? It's a sunny, funderful day. Figured I should chillax on the beach.”

“You cannot park here for beach access. This is a residential street.”

“But that be my boss's hizzle.”

“Come again?”

“Number One Tangerine is his boss's house,” I translate.

“Aw-ite, Danny Boy. You got it goin' on. Anyways, the big man want me to keep an eye on his shit.”

“You work for Bruno Mazzilli, is that correct?” says Ceepak.

“At's ite. He owns the boardwalk, brurva. My old man? He just be renting space.”

“Well,” says Ceepak, “you can tell Mr. Mazzilli that any items removed from his house as evidence will be returned to him at the conclusion of any and all legal proceedings. This area is now considered a crime scene, and I must ask you to move along.

“My old man in trouble?”

“Move along, Mr. O'Malley.”

“You dudes takin' him down?” he asks gleefully. “You find some incriminating shit in there? Everybody know he be boning the Baker biatch.”

“If you do not move your vehicle, sir, we will be forced to call a tow truck and have it moved for you.”

“'Course, I banged her, too. Gail ‘Da Ho' Baker. Big Paddy had to settle for sloppy seconds. My big bro Skipperdoodle never did tap that pooty. Crashed and burned, big time. His loss. Girl had her a bumpin' booty—”

“So, Sean,” I say, because I'm afraid he'll say tooty-fruity or kooty next, “don't you have a butt to go kiss? Mr. Mazzilli probably wonders where you are.”

“Yeah.” He cranks the ignition. “You'll see. Mr. Mazzilli gonna put me in charge of the Rolling Thunder when Daddy goes to jail!”

Ceepak rests both hands on Sean's rolled down window.

“I thought your brother Kevin was the designated heir for all your father's business affairs.”

“That's what Big Paddy like to see happen. But Bruno ain't gonna deal with Kevin. Calls him a sanctimonious piece of shit on a regular basis. That roller coaster? That baby's gonna be mine, brurva, I guaran-damn-tee it. Later!”

The cocky kid peels wheels and tears up the road because he knows we're way too busy to write him up.

Especially since he just made himself another suspect in Gail Baker's murder.

“You think Sean's the one framing the father?” I say.

“It is yet another possibility, Danny. However, I consider it a remote one at best.”

“How come?”

“Young Sean strikes me as rather incompetent.”

True. I can't imagine him taking the time to orchestrate the whole deal. He's too busy memorizing hip-hop slang.

“Furthermore, I feel he has an exaggerated sense of his own worth to Mr. Mazzilli, who is brilliant and ruthless when it comes to business. It is highly unlikely that he would turn—”

“Guys?”

Detective Botzong is at the front door, signaling for us to come back in.

“You're gonna want to see this,” he says.

We double-time it up the walkway.

“What did you find?” asks Ceepak when we hit the front door.

Botzong leads the way. “Potassium chloride. In the first floor-medicine chest.”

Uh-oh.

Potassium chloride is one of the drugs used for executing criminals with a lethal injection.

It stops the heart from beating.

29

W
E COME INTO THE KITCHEN AND SEE
C
AROLYN
M
ILLER
hovering over a row of glass vials lined up on the marble island in the center of the kitchen.

They're tiny bottles with bright yellow labels and metal caps, the kind doctors tip over and jab needles into to draw out serum when they give you a shot. Six of them. My eyes are young enough to read the label: Potassium Chloride—Concentrate Must Be Diluted Before Use. Four vials are empty, their lids punctured.

“So,” says Botzong, “either one of the men in the house had a serious potassium deficiency or they wanted to jump straight to step three of the lethal injection sequence.”

Ceepak nods. “They knock you out with sodium thiopental. Paralyze you with pancuronium bromide. Stop your heart with potassium chloride. A bolus injection of 100 milliequivalents affects the electrical potential of the heart muscle. It simply stops.”

“Remember that male nurse in Indiana?” says Botzong. “They convicted him of killing six people by injecting them with potassium chloride to induce heart attack.”

“They suspected him of killing a hundred,” adds Ceepak. “Mostly elderly patients at the county hospital where he worked.”

“Wait a second,” I say, confusion wrinkling my brow. “Gail Baker didn't have a heart attack.”

“No,” says Ceepak. “But Mrs. O'Malley certainly did.”

Jeez-o, man.

“He killed them both?”

“We can't make that assumption,” says Botzong. “Not yet, anyway. But this?” He gestures at the lineup of little bottles, all of which, I now notice, are labeled as 20 ml vials with 40 mEq, which must be that milliequivalent thing Ceepak rattled off. I do the math: Fill a syringe with two and a half bottles and you could stop a condemned man's heart on death row in the thirty-six states where lethal injection is the preferred form of capital punishment.

And, like I said, three of the six ampoules are empty.

“Did you find needles and syringes?” asks Ceepak.

“No,” says Miller.

“Were there any other suspicious drugs in the medicine chest?” asks Ceepak. “Anything that might've been utilized to incapacitate Ms. Baker? Chloroform? GHB?”

Miller shakes her head. “No. I'm wondering now if our guy just didn't sneak up behind Baker and bop her on the head with that blunt object Dr. Kurth labeled as the murder weapon. Maybe he tried knocking her out like they do in the movies and ended up killing her instead with the blow that cracked the skull and breached the dura matter.”

I guess I look confused again because Ceepak explains, “That's the outermost meningeal layer of the brain, Danny.”

Okay. Now I've got a headache to go with my queasy stomach.

“Would the potassium chloride show up in Mrs. O'Malley's body?” I ask, mostly so I can quit picturing my brain as a squishy layer cake packed inside a Tupperware carrying case.

“Not really,” says Botzong. “It's not even a poison. Just a chemical compound you need to live. Too much, it screws with nerve signals in your heart. Plus, now Mrs. O'Malley's body has been embalmed for burial. Embalming fluid wipes out just about everything else that might be swimming around inside a corpse.”

“So somebody killed Mrs. O'Malley, and then, the day of her funeral, they killed Gail? Why?”

“Danny?” This from Ceepak. “So far, we have nothing to link the two deaths.”

“Except Mr. O'Malley,” I say. “He killed his wife and then his mistress, who wanted to become his new wife. He killed her before she had a chance to start nagging him.”

“It's a possibility, Danny,” is all Ceepak says in reply to my lame excuse for a criminal motive.

“So,” says Botzong, “where does Mr. O'Malley—or whoever—get this many vials of the concentrate?”

“We need to check with hospitals, doctor's offices,” says Ceepak. “See if any has gone missing from the pharmacy closets.”

“Of course,” adds Miller, “the majority of the potassium chloride produced is used for making fertilizer.”

“Peter O'Malley runs a landscaping company!” I say.

“True,” says Ceepak. “But he was nowhere near the roller coaster last weekend and I don't think potassium chloride would be packaged in bottles like this for horticultural purposes. This most likely came from a doctor's office or a hospital, somewhere patients are treated for hypokalemia, low potassium”

“What about Dr. Hausler?” I say to Ceepak, remembering the broken-hearted, monkey-faced dentist. “Would he have access to this drug?”

“Perhaps,” says Ceepak. “But, as you recall, Danny, he was jealous of the rich men giving Gail gifts. I do not think he would supply one of them with the chemical compound they needed to induce a heart attack in their wife.”

“Who's this Hausler?” asks Botzong.

“A local dentist who was romantically linked for a short period of time with Ms. Baker.”

“Marco?”

“Putting him on the list.”

“Here is his business card,” says Ceepak. “When we interviewed Dr. Hausler, he had a pretty solid alibi for the time of death.”

“Any reason he'd want to kill Mrs. O'Malley, too?” asks Botzong.

“None that is readily apparent.”

“Okay, let's make Mr. O'Malley and those who might want to frame him our prime targets,” says Botzong. “You two guys were there when Mrs. O'Malley died, right?”

We nod.

“Did you see anything up on that roller coaster? Anything hit you as hinky?”

“Not at the time,” says Ceepak.

“Could Mr. O'Malley have injected his wife with an undiluted dose without her knowing it?”

“Perhaps,” says Ceepak. “If he waited until the ride started rolling. Used the commotion and excitement to cover his actions.”

“If he injected a large enough dose,” says Miller, “the effects would be almost instantaneous.”

Yeah. She'd have a “heart attack” by the time they hit the second hill.

“Kevin O'Malley was sitting right behind her,” I add. “He could have jabbed her in the neck. The headrests in the roller coaster cars had those slotted vents—like in a sports car, you know? He could've poked the needle right through one of the openings.”

“And why does Kevin O'Malley want us to arrest his old man for murder?” asks Botzong

“With the death of his mother and the incarceration of his father,” Ceepak explains, “Kevin O'Malley would assume total control of the O'Malley family empire.”

“Maybe Kevin did it when they were climbing that first hill,” I say. “Gravity pins his mom's head to the back of the seat. He leans forward like he wants to tell her something. Bam! Pokes her with the poison dart!”

Everybody around the marble countertop is sort of staring at me now. I hypothesize out loud more dramatically than most cops.

“Are their video cameras on the roller coaster track?” asks Botzong.

“Yes,” says Ceepak. “I noticed several. The operator in the control room most likely uses their video feeds to monitor the ride.”

“We need to track down the digital recordings from last Saturday morning,” Botzong says to his team. “Might help us see what actually went on up there.”

“Sir?” says Carolyn Miller. “I seriously doubt whether they record the input from those track cameras. After all, they're utilized for operational purposes, not enhanced security.”

True. You don't get many shoplifters on a roller coaster ride.

“The dead air,” I mumble.

“Come again?” says Ceepak.

“Cliff Skeete did that live remote broadcast on WAVY. He was riding the ride with the O'Malleys and all the local big wigs. When they all started screaming ‘heart attack,' the station took him off the air. But they were probably rolling tape on his feed at the station. Recording it. We could also
hear
what happened.”