I thought about what she said—or at any rate, I thought about what I thought she had said. It was true that South Florida was littered with bargain real estate right now. No matter how much the economy was officially improving everywhere else, Miami was still full of people who were in over their heads on a bad mortgage, and many of them were simply walking away, leaving the bank holding the worthless paper as well as the overpriced house. And quite often the banks, in turn, were anxiously unloading the houses for a fraction of the original price.
I knew all this very well from a general and somewhat disinterested standpoint. Lately the whole subject of foreclosure and bargain houses was on everybody’s lips, much like the weather. Everyone talked about it, and the media were full of stories and discussions and panels with dire warnings. And closer to home, even my own brother, Brian, was happily employed dealing with this same phenomenon.
But to go from this theoretical awareness of foreclosure into the very real idea of taking personal advantage of it took a moment of adjustment. I liked living where we were, and I had already given up my comfy little apartment to do so. Moving again would be difficult and uncomfortable and inconvenient, and there was no guarantee at all that we would end up someplace better, especially with a house that had been abandoned in despair and anger. There might be holes kicked in the roof, and wiring ripped out—and at the very least, wouldn’t there be bad karma to deal with?
But once again, Lily Anne proved that she saw things a little more clearly and shrewdly than her dunderheaded father. As I wrestled with all the concepts of foreclosure and moving and personal inconvenience, she cut right to the heart of the matter with an insight that was sharp and compelling. She bounced three times on her powerful little legs and said, “Da. Da da da.” And for emphasis, she
reached out and pulled on my earlobe.
I looked at my little girl, and I came to a decision. “You’re right,” I told her. “You deserve your own room.” I turned to Rita to tell her what I had decided, but she had leaned back against the edge of the table and closed her eyes again, and her head was swaying gently, her mouth open and her hands clasped in her lap.
“Rita?” I said.
She jerked upright and her eyes popped open wide. “Oh!” she said. “Oh, my God, you scared me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “About the house?”
“Yes,” she said, and she frowned. “Brian says— Oh, I hope you don’t mind,” she said, and she looked a little bit guilty. “I talked to him first? Because, you know, his job.” She fluttered a hand again and it bumped against the edge of the table. “Ouch,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, with soothing encouragement. “You talked to Brian. That’s good.”
“It is good,” she said. “He Is Good. He knows really what ups. Wha’s up. With houses. Right now, I mean.” “Yes, he does.”
“He’s going to help us,” she said. “Find, find …”
“Find a house,” I said.
Rita shook her head slowly and then closed her eyes. I waited, but nothing happened. “I’m sorry,” she said at last, very softly. “I think I need to go lie down.” She got up from the bench; the empty wineglass fell to the ground and the stem snapped off, but Rita didn’t notice. She stood there, swayed for a moment, and then meandered back into the house.
“Well, then,” I said to Lily Anne. “I guess we’re moving.”
Lily Anne bounced. “Da,” she said firmly.
I stood up and carried her into the house to make a telephone call; it looked like it was pizza night after all.
TEN
THE NEXT MORNING WHEN I GOT IN TO WORK, THERE WAS A lab report from the medical examiner’s office waiting on my desk. I glanced through it briefly and then, when I saw what it was, I sat down and read it with real interest. The report gave the results of the autopsy on Officer Gunther, and if you threw out all the technical jargon, it said several significant things. First, blood pooling in the tissue indicated that he had been lying facedown for several hours after death—interesting, since he had been faceup when his body was found by the Torch of Friendship. It probably meant our psycho had killed Gunther in the late afternoon, then left him stashed all alone somewhere until dark. Sometime in the night he had recovered his sense of camaraderie and moved the body to the Torch of Friendship.
There were several pages detailing the massive trauma to Gunther’s assorted organs and limbs, adding up to the same picture we’d gotten from Klein. The report did not speculate, of course; that would have been unprofessional and possibly a little too helpful. But it did state that the damage had been caused by an object that was probably made of steel and possessed a smooth, oblong striking surface about the size of a playing card, which sounded like some kind of large hammer to me.
Once again, the condition of the internal organs confirmed what the exterior tissue indicated: The killer had worked very hard to keep Gunther alive as long as possible, while carefully breaking every conceivable bone with deliberate and vicious force. It didn’t seem like a very pleasant way to die, but then, on reflection, I couldn’t think of a single way to die that was pleasant—certainly nothing I had ever tried. Not that I’d really looked for anything of the kind; where would the fun be in a pleasant death?
I flipped through the report until I came to a page that had been highlighted with fluorescent yellow marker. It listed the contents of Gunther’s stomach, and half of the list had been colored in a solid bright yellow, almost certainly by Deborah. I read it and I didn’t need the highlighting to find the significant part. Among the other nasty things swimming around in his guts, Gunther had eaten something containing cornmeal, iceberg lettuce, ground beef, and several spices, chief among them chili powder and cumin.
In other words, his last meal had been a taco, just like it had been for Klein. For both their sakes, I hoped they were really good tacos.
I had barely finished reading the report when my desk telephone rang, and using my vast and all-seeing psychic powers I determined that it was probably my sister calling. I picked up the receiver anyway and said, “Morgan.”
“Did you read the coroner’s report?” Deborah demanded.
“Just finished it,” I said.
“Stay put,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”
Two minutes later she walked into my office carrying her own copy of the report. “What did you think?” she said, sliding into a chair and waving the pages.
“I don’t like his prose style,” I said. “And the plot seems very familiar.”