The Memory Killer (26 page)

The first concerned Jeremy’s relationship with Ava. The surprise would take time to assimilate. Given Jeremy’s strange attraction to Ava so many years ago, it should not have been a total surprise that he had needed to see her again. And given Ava’s dysfunctional, addicted history, that she had needed to see him.

The second pile of thoughts related to Jeremy’s move and reshaping of his identity and history, especially his tying it to mine. I was deeply troubled by his attraction to a community of prominence, with thousands of eyes wandering the streets on a daily basis. I would not have been so worried if I knew my brother planned to live a hermit’s life, locked within his walls, but he seemed to be planning to venture into crowds, to live a normal life.

It could never happen. I had to convince him of that – for his sake and now Ava’s – but that lay in the future.

The final pile was his analysis of Donnie Ocampo, the stack of most pressing concern, and where my thoughts focused. That Donnie was not sane – my brother and I were in harmony there – but Jeremy’s conclusion that the Brothers Ocampo shared communication made no sense to me.

But as I ordered a second beer, I considered the times I’d gone to Jeremy for advice. They were few in number, and his analysis often made little sense at the moment offered, but in the end had been preternaturally accurate. So I sat and focused on feelings sparked by Gary, replaying the time I’d spent with him in my head, recalling moments when something had seemed a shade askew.

I had been surprised at Gary’s initial position that Donnie wasn’t really harming the victims, as if abduction and rape were lightweight crimes, and it wasn’t until Harold Brighton’s legs had been demolished that the horror of Donnie’s actions seemed to register in Gary’s mind.

“
It’s not supposed to be like this
,” Gary had wailed after I told him about Brighton. “
He’s hurting people. Donnie’s actually
hurting
them!
”

What wasn’t supposed to be like
this
? What was
It?

Then there was Gary’s request for a meeting with the victims, the one I’d quashed, Gary then asking if he could meet with Derek Scott, since he had eluded Donnie and been only lightly wounded. What had Gary put as his reason to meet the victims?

“
I’m responsible for their pain and troubles
.”

He wasn’t, Donnie was, and it seemed strange to put first-person-singular before the victims’ pain. I’d felt some of his words and perceptions were discordant myself, but the world itself veers from pitch, and I’d allowed latitude, perhaps because I felt sorry for Gary Ocampo.

I checked my watch: two hours had passed. I’d head home tonight and confront Gary Ocampo first thing in the morning. It was time to throw hardball questions and see how he responded.

It was almost three in the morning. The Miami moon soared high above Gary’s Fantasy World, FCLE investigators-in-training Mike Rasmussen and Terrence Longo back in surveillance position. They’d been spelled for six hours by a second unit, returning for a midnight-to-dawn stint, this time in a fifteen-year-old beater Caddy with smoked windows.

Rasmussen zipped up his fly – made difficult by the steering wheel between his thighs – and snapped the lid on a twenty-ounce Styrofoam coffee cup, now filled with urine. He set it carefully in a bag, turned in his seat and wedged it in a box with five other cups. Two held coffee.

“Don’t get ’em mixed up, partner,” Terrence Longo said. Both were in their late twenties and had been pulled from the investigative-trainee reserves on the twenty-second floor of Miami’s Clark Center, which they shared with the full-time investigators, whose ranks they craved to join. The twenty-third floor was reserved for the Big Dogs – like Roy McDermott – and the senior investigators like Lonnie Canseco, Celia Valdez, and the hulking, grunting Charlie Degan.

A couple of the major specialists also had offices there, like Carson Ryder who, it was rumored, could detect psychosis by the scent of one’s breath. The twenty-second-floor dicks laughed at that one, but several held their breath when passing Ryder in the hall. It was Ryder who had requested the surveillance, and both had been impressed that the guy had spoken to them that afternoon, cool trick, tying the shoe and talking perfectly clear without moving his lips.

“We buy coffee in the cups, drink it,” Rasmussen mused, “piss it back into the same cups. Then we go buy more coffee and it starts all over. You think coffee ever laughs at us?”

Longo started to respond, froze, his eyes staring down the street. “Motion,” he said, lifting the night-vision binoculars to his eyes.

“What?”

Longo lowered the lenses. “Nothing. Just Dirty Hairy out for a moonlight stroll.”

Dirty Hairy was a nighttime regular on the street outside Gary’s Fantasy World, an alcoholic vagrant who drifted between trash cans looking for things to eat, drink or turn into cash. He wasn’t big on bathing or shaving, a pair of bloodshot eyes peering from above a piratical beard littered with remnants of previous meals. Like many street denizens, his age was indeterminate; he looked Paleozoic, but could have been thirty. Hairy trash-picked his way toward the cops, pausing to open crumpled fast-food bags in the gutter, hoping for errant fries.

Headlamps appeared on the deserted avenue as a vehicle pulled from a side street and turned toward the shop. Dirty Hairy hobbled to a brick building and flattened himself against it. The vehicle slowed as it closed in and an MDPD cruiser pulled beside the pair, its window rolling down.

“Moonlight becomes you,” MDPD officer Jason Bogard said to Rasmussen. The cop at the helm of the cruiser, Silvio Balbón, chuckled. “Still watching for the same guy, right?” Bogard said.

“Donnie Ocampo,” Rasmussen said. “You’ve got the photo?”

“Yep. Problem is your boy ain’t real distinctive: six-foot or so, kinda around two hundred pounds, blue eyes if he ain’t wearing color contacts, and a couple tats hidden with a long-sleeve shirt.”

“That’s why we’re hoping he’ll show up here. To make it easy.”

“Y’say he’s got a grudge against the guy owns the funny-books store?”

“What I hear.”

Bogard shook his head. He stared down the street, smiled. “Hairy still thinks getting flat against things makes him invisible, I see.”

Longo squinted toward the vagrant frozen to the wall. “Hairy who? Hairy where?”

Bogard knocked his knuckles against the side of the cruiser. “Well, keep ’em hanging loose, boys. We’re back to the mean streets.”

The cruiser rolled away and ten minutes passed, with Dirty Hairy peeling from the wall and drifting away, Rasmussen kvetching about coffee’s hijinks, Longo lifting the glasses to spot a mongrel dog working the same containers as Dirty Hairy.

Pops in the distance.

“The hell was that?” Rasmussen said. “Firecrackers?”

The radio crackled on an MDPD band. “
Shots fired!
” screamed the speakers. “
Officer down! Help! Officer down, 223 Garret Street
.”

“Jesus,” Rasmussen said. “It’s just two blocks away.” He looked to Longo. “what’ll we do.”

“We’re suppose to stay here,” Longo said, jaw clenched.

“
Need help bad, here. Anyone! Officer down!
”

The sound of more shots. Longo nodded toward the comic-book shop. “This’ll keep. We got a cousin on the ropes.”

The engine roared and Rasmussen smoked a U-turn in the street, racing to the address.

The next morning I was up with the earliest gulls and herons to swim in the cove. The case had broken my rhythm and I’d missed my pre-work swim and run. I needed them today: they refreshed my head and gave me more room for thinking, and I would need all my gray matter this morning. For better or worse I was going to assume that Jeremy was right and Gary and Donnie had some form of relationship and/or communications.

Which would mean that Gary Ocampo had been playing me from the git-go.

I got to downtown Miami at nine and headed to the department. The comic shop didn’t open until ten. I could have gone over early, but I wanted to waltz in like usual, laid back and buddy-buddy.

Then, when Gary was distracted by bonhomie, I’d try to tear his story apart.

Roy was back from Tallahassee and standing in front of his desk, a translucent yo-yo tied to his finger as he whipped it up and down.

“Watch this, Carson … I’m gonna walk the dog.”

Roy flipped the yo-yo at the floor, but instead of spinning above the carpet, it zinged back up at his head, Roy ducking a split-second before getting bonked. The yo-yo wobbled disconsolately to the end of its little rope.

“Crap,” Roy said, staring at the toy. “I had it last night.”

“You’ll get it back,” I assured him. “Listen, Roy, I talked to my consultant.”

He disentangled the toy from his finger and dropped it in a drawer. “Can he help us nail this mad fucker?”

“My guy thinks the Ocampo brothers have something going on together.”

“Whoa … no shit?”

I held up my hands. “Nothing’s proven. But I’m gonna go beat on Gary Ocampo and see what happens.”

I was two steps down the hall when Roy yelled, “Hey, Carson! Speaking about Ocampo, you hear about the hoopla near there last night?”

I spun on my heels. “Hoopla?”

Roy gave me a twenty-second synopsis about gunshots and an unclaimed call going out over the airwaves. It didn’t make a lot of sense. I stopped him in mid-sentence. “Hold up, Roy. The dispatchers get a call about gunshots and put it over the air to patrol units …”

He nodded. “They hear the dreaded ‘officer down’. It’s red-zone panic and every unit within miles races to the address. They cordon the house, figuring there’s a shooter inside, maybe a hostage. Everyone’s trying to figure out who’s down, who called it in. MDPD’s got over a dozen patrol units on scene, the tactical team, a command car, two medical squads, a fire truck, and Longo and Rasmussen.”

“Wait … They left the shop?”

“They were two blocks away and heard
officer down
. What would you have done, watch a goddamn building or maybe save a fellow cop?”

I’d seen this before. What you wanted was a measured response, what you often got was an over-response, too many people running in circles, emotions running high, exactly when mistakes were made.

“How many MDPD cops were on scene, Roy? Probably a quarter of the street force, right? What did Longo and Rasmussen add?”

Roy sighed, seeing my point. “Yeah … our boys had a job and they blew it.”

“Go on, Roy. So …”

“So everyone’s stacked up waiting for someone to make sense of things. Longo and Rasmussen see they’re excess baggage and book back to the store.”

“How long were they gone?”

“They say forty minutes max. Meanwhile, back at the house, it’s a three a.m. cluster fuck. Took two hours to get a tac team inside. They find the homeowner, Elma Aguilla, taped tight in a back bedroom, a string of blown-up M-80s on the living-room floor.”

“The gunshots.”

“Someone entered the home, punched Aguilla out, taped her tight, and left a string of M-80s on a long fuse. The perp split and when the fireworks went off neighbors called them in as gunshots. Then someone comes on the police frequency and starts screaming about an officer down.”

I could envision the scene in my mind. I just couldn’t envision why. “What the hell was happening, Roy?”

He upended his hands. “Someone thought it might have been a diversion, but no crimes were reported in the area. Weird, huh?”

I headed to my office, running Roy’s words through my head.

Someone thought it might have been a diversion, but no crimes were reported …

“Diversion,” I whispered, grabbing my phone and calling Gary Ocampo, my heart suddenly on full adrenalin.

He answered on the second ring. “I’m sorry about yesterday, Detective. I’m just … trying to sort things out.”

I blew out a breath. “You’re fine?”

“I’m just finishing breakfast.” I heard him take a sip of coffee or water. A pause. “Why?”

“There was a commotion in your neighborhood last night. You hear it?”

“I, uh, heard sirens and stuff, like a fire somewhere. I went back to sleep.”

“OK, just checking, like I said.”

“Detective Ryder?”

“Yes?”

“Donnie’s evil. I didn’t know, you’ve got to believe me. I’m scared.”

“What do you mean, didn’t know?”

Silence.

“Donnie can’t get to you, Gary,” I said. “I’ve got you under constant surveillance.” I didn’t mention last night’s half-hour lapse and heard a long pause on his end.

He said, “There are other things to be scared about.”

Gary Ocampo was being cryptic and discordant. One half-hour meeting with my brother and I heard it.

“Other things like what?”

He said, “I gotta go.”

“HANG ON, Gary,” I barked. “I’m coming by in fifteen minutes. There are things we need to talk about.”

“No, I mean I gotta
go.
To the bathroom. NOW.”

I was in front of his store in minutes, starting inside when I looked down the street and saw a bakery truck, its side painted with a loaf of bread. The more I’d thought about the pair leaving their post, the more irritated I’d become. They should have known that every MDPD officer within a three-mile radius would drag race to the address the second the call crackled off.

I saw anxious eyes watching through the tinted side window. There was no shoe-tie hydrant beside the vehicle, and anyway I wanted my wishes directly stated. I rolled back the passenger-side door and saw the pair. They gave me sheepish and Rasmussen took the lead.

“Uh, Detective Ryder, about last night …”

My hand chopped down:
shut up.
“I will be in the building for one hour,” I said quietly. “Use it to piss, shit, get food, get coffee, get laid, whatever. Then I want you back here until the Second Coming or I have someone relieve you, whichever comes first. Do you understand?”

Averted eyes and
yessirs
in perfect harmony. I strode to the shop where Jonathan was dusting books and DVDs. He looked at me expectantly. “You gonna talk to him about not selling the shop?”