Blood Relations Read online

  Looking through the lens, Caitlin focused on a young man and a girl in matching windbreakers, both smiling. The girl was leaning lightly against his chest. Caitlin pressed the shutter and the camera clicked and buzzed, two frames per second. The art director came over to check the angles, then shouted for the models to stand in another position.

  “Catie? I have to go.”

  “Okay.” She looked through the viewfinder and pressed the shutter release. “I’ll call you later.”

  “We’ll talk about what I asked you before.”

  “All right.”

  Tommy told her to wait a second, the sun was going behind a cloud.

  Frank said, “You don’t remember what I asked you before.”

  She turned around and made a guilty smile. “I’m sorry.”

  “Come live with me. I’ll buy us a fantastic place. You can have your studio right there if you want.”

  He was happy, she could see that. She knew she’d have to tell him no. “We’ll talk about it later,” she said.

  A motion caught her eye. The brim on the art director’s hat had turned toward the production van. Now the client and the costumer looked in the same direction, and so did the woman they were talking to.

  Then Caitlin heard someone wailing.

  Rafael Soto was at the door of the Winnebago, swinging from the frame. He took the steps down, walked a few feet, then sank to the ground.

  Everyone ran to him. Caitlin pushed through. “Rafael!” She knelt beside him. “What happened?” Looking up she saw Ali Duncan’s wide-eyed face at the door.

  Rafael pressed into Caitlin’s shoulder. “He’s dead! Oh, God. Oh, God. They shot him.”

  “Shot who? Rafael, please.”

  He sobbed. “Sullivan. He’s dead. I called the agency about the job tomorrow, and they told me. Someone shot him. Oh, my God, he’s dead.”

  chapter fifteen

  At Pier Park, the southernmost point on Miami Beach, a long mound of sand ran parallel to the beach as a storm break. A boardwalk had been constructed along the top of it, and sea oats had been planted to keep it from blowing away. Just past the point where the sea oats ended and the ground sloped gently toward the ocean, lay the body of Charlie Sullivan. A Canadian couple out walking at dawn had at first thought he was asleep, then began to wonder how he could breathe with his face in the sand.

  Sam Hagen was not the assistant state attorney on call, but Detective Eugene Ryabin beeped him. When Sam arrived there was yellow crime tape across the entrance to the boardwalk and an officer posted. He showed his ID, went under the tape, and climbed the wooden steps. From the top he could see a group of about a dozen Miami Beach Police detectives and uniformed officers gathered in a ragged semicircle twenty yards up the beach. Through the gaps between them he glimpsed a prone figure which he assumed to be the remains of Charlie Sullivan. The body, clad in tan slacks and white shirt, lay on a diagonal axis, legs pointed roughly toward the water, head near the grass-covered dune.

  On the beach uniformed officers kept the onlookers back about fifty yards on either side. A few tourists had their cameras out. Crime scene techs walked slowly back and forth, picking up a soda can here, a cigarette butt there. Two news photographers had their telephotos trained on the activity, and a helicopter from a local TV station was hovering overhead, not quite close enough to be a nuisance.

  As Sam descended the steps, Ryabin noticed him and waved him over. Sam could feel the sand going over the tops of his leather shoes. Nobody was going to get castings of footprints from this terrain.

  A thin, young-looking man in a plaid sport shirt and casual slacks squatted beside the body—David Corso from the Medical Examiner’s office. The police wouldn’t touch the body until he had finished his examination.

  Sam stopped beside Ryabin.

  “Anything so far?”

  Ryabin shook his head. “Nothing.” The word came out as nothink. “No witnesses, nobody coming to us to say he heard gunshots. No footprints, no weapons, nothing left on the sand. The money and credit cards were still in his wallet.”

  The wind was lifting Charlie Sullivan’s blond hair, and the sun shone through it, turning it golden and silky. There was a dark red entry wound at the base of the skull. Dr. Corso, his hands in latex, brushed aside the hair and pressed a thumb on the hole. Sam felt his scalp prickling. Blood had seeped into the sand. The bullet had gone all the way through the skull.

  “Fabric,” Corso announced. His fingers combed through the dead man’s hair. “There’s fabric around the wound.”

  Hands braced on knees, Ryabin leaned over to say, “Fabric?”

  “Fabric, fuzz, cotton. Green, I’d say.” Corso held up a piece and squinted through his rimless glasses. “It’s charred, probably from the gun, wouldn’t you think?” Corso’s rail-thin physique, thick glasses, and mop of light brown hair often caused others to peg him for a computer nerd rather than a ten-year veteran of the M.E.’s office.

  Ryabin gestured. “Look down the back of his shirt.”

  Corso did so. Some blood had oozed down the sides of the neck, not much getting on the shirt. He retrieved several irregularly shaped bits of tattered fabric, dropped them into a plastic bag, then slit the shirt halfway down, not finding anything more. The skin on Charlie Sullivan’s back was pale and bloodless.

  An older detective on Ryabin’s shift said, “The shooter could’ve wrapped the barrel to keep the noise down. Possible?”

  Ryabin agreed that it was. He told one of the crime techs to get an evidence tag. And to bring something to lay under the head when they turned the body over. He didn’t want sand in the wound, and didn’t want to lose any fabric samples that might still be present around it.

  After a piece of plastic tarp had been laid next to the body, Corso stood up and motioned for the nearest officer to help him. He was a burly kid in his twenties who flexed his hands a couple of times before he touched the corpse. Together he and Corso pulled on an arm and shoulder. Rigor mortis had set in. For a moment the face seemed to cling to the sand, then come away slowly, a mass of glistening red and purplish brown. The jaw and forehead were still intact, teeth exposed but twisted. A clump of something meaty slid out where the mouth and nose used to be.

  “Holy shit,” someone said. More profanities followed, including a remark about the ultimate blow job.

  Taking a sharp breath, Sam concentrated for a few seconds on the ocean. Morning light shone through the breakers as they crested and curled. The tide was out, but wind whipped up the foam. Beneath the salt smell of the Atlantic lay the darker scents of blood and human waste.

  When he looked back he noticed the red circle on Charlie Sullivan’s white shirt. The bullet had gone into the chest but hadn’t exited the body.

  Sam asked one of the crime scene techs, “Did you find any shell casings?”

  “Uh-uh. Shooter probably had a revolver, or he picked them up, which I doubt, because it’s black-ass dark out here at night.”

  The shirt was some grade of cotton that said money. Likewise the thin gold watch. One slip-on shoe was upside down beside its foot, and the socks were tan like the slacks, patterned with white squares.

  Sam had seen dozens of corpses, and they all looked peaceful to him, like sleeping children. Even the worst of them, the most brutally slashed or bludgeoned, seemed to have passed beyond pain to a state of ultimate serenity. He liked to think so.

  Two detectives were arguing across the body whether the slug still in it was a hollow-point or steel-jacketed. One of the uniforms said it had to be a hollow-point to blow out the face like that. He mimed holding a gun, arm extended, barrel at the back of another cop’s head. “Steel jacket’s going to sail right through the fucker.”

  The other cop said, “Yeah, but we got stippling on the wound there. Means the barrel’s right up against the skull, no place for the gases to go but straight into the head. That can blow out your brains, too.”

  “I don’t see powder on the shirt,”
noted a cop positioned near what remained of Charlie Sullivan’s head. “The shooter was at a distance shooting into the chest. He pops him, then puts another one in the brain to make sure. Was this person in the drug trade?”

  “He was a fashion model.”

  “No shit.”

  “Yeah, I seen him around. I work off-duty, I seen him at the clubs.”

  “If I had a body like that my wife would go wild.”

  “This guy, now when he says, ‘Gimme some head,’ he means it literally.”

  Laughter.

  “Oh, Jesus. That’s sick.”

  “A model? Come on. He’s a faggot. A jealous lover did him in.”

  “Maybe he was out here with another guy.”

  “A quickie on the beach, why not? I see it all the time.”

  “Yeah, but his pants are still up.”

  “Hey, you going to go down on a guy then shoot him?”

  “I ain’t goin’ down on a guy period, my friend.”

  “You’re wrong. I can’t see the jealous lover scenario. If it was a jealous lover, he would’ve got stabbed in the nuts, something vicious like that. I say drugs.”

  Someone told a story about three dealers taken out last week over in Miami. Hands tied, popped in the back of the head.

  Ryabin lit a cigarette, cupping his hand around his lighter. He snapped it shut and inhaled deeply. Gesturing with the cigarette, he told Sam that Sullivan had lived on the other side of the park in Portofino Towers.

  There were several high-rise buildings to the west, most of them luxury condominiums. Ryabin said, “There’s a doorman. He could have seen him leave with someone. We’ll talk to the neighbors as well.”

  Sam said, “It’s not a drug-related killing.”

  “I would agree with that,” Ryabin said.

  “But not done on the spur of the moment, either,” Sam said. “The shooter knew where he lived. May have known him well enough to entice him out here in the dark.”

  Corso was taking more photographs. All the medical examiners had their own camera equipment, rather than rely on the police. When Corso finished, he gave the camera to one of the uniformed cops to hold. He put on a fresh pair of gloves and unbuttoned Sullivan’s shirt to make sure the hole in the fabric lined up with the hole in his chest.

  The skin was mottled purple where the blood had settled, sinking to the lowest point. Now that the body had been turned over, the dark side was on top. He’d been in full rigor mortis two hours ago when a squad car had responded to the scene. Dade County M.E.’s didn’t take core body temperature to determine time of death; it was notoriously unreliable. Sam assumed that Charlie Sullivan had died sometime last night, a brilliant deduction, and not much more could be added with certainty. An autopsy would show the angle at which the first shot had entered the chest. This would help determine the height of the shooter and the distance.

  Using a scalpel, Corso slit the pants open far enough to decide that there had been no other injuries. He checked the dead man’s hands, looked at the fingernails, then removed his watch and jewelry. He put these into a plastic bag, which he handed to one of the detectives, who sealed it. The on-scene examination was over.

  Now the police photographer was panning slowly, taking pictures of the crowd with a telephoto lens. A shooter who denied he was in town could sometimes be located in a crime scene photo. In the background a couple of high-school age kids were tossing a Frisbee.

  Sam’s eyes swept across the faces, then backtracked. There was a man in shorts and a faded yellow T-shirt sitting on the end of a wooden beach lounger. He looked familiar. Slender, late twenties. He had short dark hair, red-framed glasses, and high-topped canvas sneakers. Sam studied him for a minute trying to decide where he had seen him before and finally remembered. He was the hair and makeup designer Caitlin used for most of her fashion shoots. Sam had met him a couple of times at her apartment. Rafael … The last name wouldn’t click. The way he sat, with his hands clasped between his knees, and his eyes fixed on the sand, told Sam he had not come here out of mere curiosity.

  Soto. Rafael Soto.

  Stripping off his gloves, Corso tossed them into a brown leather bag and put his camera in after. He took out a green tag and checked off instructions to the technicians at the morgue who would prepare the body for autopsy. Corso leaned over to slip the tag around Sullivan’s wrist. His work here was finished. Now the police photographer closed in to take his own views of the body. The van would arrive shortly to pick up the remains.

  Sam told Ryabin about Rafael Soto.

  Ryabin’s pale, pouchy eyes fixed on the young man, who was now standing with his hands tucked under his armpits as if he were cold. Ryabin asked, “He and Charlie Sullivan were an item?”

  Sam didn’t know.

  “We should ask him.”

  “You go,” Sam said.

  As Ryabin trudged through the sand, the wind ruffled his white hair and flipped his tie over his shoulder.

  “Mr. Hagen!” He scanned the crowd and saw a pale, skinny arm waving at him, a girl jumping up and down. Ali Duncan. She lifted the crime tape and scurried across the sand, followed by a young man in an unbuttoned plaid shirt with the sleeves cut out. He had long black hair and a bandanna around his head. A uniformed cop yelled at them to stop, but Sam motioned that it was all right, let them come.

  Ali Duncan’s china-blue eyes were wide as she peered around him toward the body of Charlie Sullivan. From where they stood not much could be seen. The cops’ legs blocked the view.

  “He’s dead, right?” Her lips drew back in a grimace. “Who did it?”

  “They don’t know. How did you hear about this?”

  She couldn’t drag her attention off the scene. “Oh, my God. He was going to testify for me. Maybe George shot him. Or Klaus’s bodyguard.” She pulled in a deep breath. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  Sam took her shoulders and turned her around. “Don’t panic. This probably has nothing to do with your case. We’ve got too many other witnesses.” He heard the assurance in his voice and wondered if she believed it. “I want you to talk to Detective Ryabin when he has a minute.”

  The young man put his hand on her shoulder. “I can stay.” He was a tall, well-built kid with Asian features.

  “That would be nice,” she said, then realized introductions were due. “Mr. Hagen, this is Tommy Chang. He’s a friend of mine.”

  Just then Sam spotted a woman in a khaki baseball hat running down the beach, making a wide circle around the crime scene. Her sneakers splashed through the edge of an incoming wave, and her long legs carried her quickly up the slope into the looser sand. Frank Tolin was following behind, trying to keep up. Caitlin was a good thirty yards ahead of him. She stopped beside Ali Duncan.

  She looked at Sam through her sunglasses, then said to Ali, “I got here as soon as I could finish. Where’s Rafael?”

  Ali pointed. “He’s talking to Detective Ryabin.”

  “Why?”

  When she started up the slope, Sam gripped her arm. “Caitlin, don’t interfere.”

  “Why are the police talking to him?” She was frowning behind the dark tint of the glasses.

  Frank finally caught up, winded. He nodded at Sam. “Hey, buddy. What’s going on?”

  “Homicide. A model by the name of Charlie Sullivan, shot sometime last night, early this morning. No witnesses so far.”

  Eugene Ryabin was giving Rafael Soto his card. Soto uncrossed his arms long enough to take it, then made a pattern in the sand with the toe of one sneaker.

  Caitlin said, “Go tell him not to talk to the police, Frank.”

  “Sweetheart, I’m not his attorney.”

  Abruptly she sprinted away, ducking under the crime tape. She put a protective arm around Rafael Soto’s waist. Sam couldn’t make out the words, but he could hear her voice at an angry pitch. Soto shook his head. Eugene Ryabin nodded to Caitlin Dorn, almost making a bow, then moved away. He glanced toward Sam, then went
back to where the other detectives were still gathered around the body.

  Ali Duncan made a disbelieving laugh. “Get real! Rafael could never hurt anybody.” She walked over to see what was going on. Her Asian friend followed.

  Frank Tolin glanced around at Sam. “Caitlin has a real soft spot for the fuckups of this world. The woman has no sense whatsoever.”

  Frank was dressed in jeans and cowboy boots and a hundred-dollar button-down shirt.

  “Let’s talk,” Sam said.

  He led Frank Tolin toward the water’s edge. The sand was firmer there, and a few yards farther out the waves were clawing at the beach, churning the broken shells. A sheet of water edged by frothy bubbles surged up the slope, then fell back. Seagulls screamed overhead, beating against the onshore wind.

  “This is about Matthew’s wrongful death case,” Sam said. “You asked Dina for two thousand dollars as a cost deposit, which she delivered on Friday. Don’t do that again, Frank. I’m on the point of wanting it back. Don’t ever go around me like that.”

  Frank seemed surprised. “Buddy. Come on.”

  “I’m not your buddy, Frank.”

  “Take it easy.” The wind played with Frank’s hair, which was still black, hardly any gray. He had a thin mouth with deep creases on either side, and a high, jutting nose. Sam wondered how much force would be needed to break it.

  Sam said, “My wife trusts you to do a decent job for her. That’s all we’ve got here.”

  “I told Dina to discuss it with you. She said she would.”

  “No. You should have talked to me. You know she isn’t well.”

  Frank lifted his arms helplessly, then let them drop against his thighs. “I’m sorry.”

  Sam exhaled heavily and looked out to sea. “What have you found so far?”

  When a wave slid toward him, Frank backed up a little, and wet sand clung to the heels of his cowboy boots. He said, “The club is still there, same owner. It’s doing good business, so I assume there are assets.”

  After a minute Sam made a short, soundless laugh. “There was a case,” he said, “when I was in your office that year. A teenager, a girl, had been hit by a car while she was riding her bicycle. She was still alive, but her brain had turned to oatmeal. One of the defenses, when it came time for the jury to consider an award for damages, was that the girl had been a slacker. Bad grades, bad attitude. Smoked pot, skipped school, ran away from home. The point being, of course, that on a monetary scale, she rated pretty low. I will not put Dina through that. She thinks the sun and stars went out when Matthew died, and the last thing she needs is a bunch of lawyers arguing over how much her son was worth to her.”