“It could’ve been the weapon used to shoot Kevin Voss. They didn’t want the connection made.”
“Well, maybe,” Paz replied. “But obviously, this is the place they held the girl.” He directed the flashlight beam to the car hoist. “The tape is still on that thing from where they tied her up. But the guy who picked up the gun was from the people who hired the hit on Voss and the kidnap, not whoever did these, um, dismemberments. They must’ve called the guys who were supposed to be watching our girl, got no answer, and came by to check it out. They found this, grabbed up the guns, and split.”
“How do you know they didn’t kill them? These guys let the girl get away, and the boss had them whacked and chopped up to set an example.”
“You believe the girl’s story? That she just happened to wriggle loose and escape from at least two armed Colombian desperados?”
“She got lucky,” said Morales with a shrug. “Why, what’s your theory?”
“I’ll show you. With the dust and grease layer on this floor, it’s like reading a book. Our little guy gets up on the roof, breaks the skylight, and drops down to the floor, here.” Paz pointed with the beam, like a teacher with a red laser gadget in front of a classroom slide. “He gets spotted by the deceased number one and whips around that parts cabinet. You can see the smeared mark where he made his jump…hey, Zwick, how’re you feeling?”
Zwick had come into the garage. He looked green in the dimness. “I’m fine,” he said, fanning away flies. “What’s happening?”
“We’re reconstructing the crime.” Paz reviewed his recent conversation with Morales and then shone the beam on the floor. “Here’s where the barefoot prints end. They go behind the cabinet and stop. Then we have jaguar prints. The jaguar walks around the other side of the cabinet, and here, you can see where the rear claws dug into the cement when it pushed off. Then it zooms through the air and takes the deceased down, from behind probably, because it bit the back of the man’s skull right off, then it flips him over, disembowels him, lots of blood on the paws, because you can see it’s walking toward the front of the garage. Then deceasednumero dos comes in, and here you can see, again, the thing digs in, those scratches, and takes off in one bound, there, and he’s on the guy, rips his throat out, tears out his belly, snacks on some liver there, and then he walks over to the hoist and has a conversation with our girlfriend Jenny. By the way, she would have been able to see the whole thing. Now, we observe, here, a pair of barefoot prints standing right where the jaguar prints are, and look at that! If you look real close, you can see that one of them is actually on top of the cat paw print, thus subsequent in time. Also note that the tape’s been slashed with a very sharp blade, all four tapes treated the same way, meaning our girl was definitely blowing smoke about wriggling free. She was sprung by the little Indian after he wasted the desperados.”
A silence ensued, which Morales broke with “So you’re saying your Indian gets in, turns into a jaguar, kills the bad guys, turns back into a man again, frees the girl, and disappears.” Morales was speaking slowly and with care, as if to a defective or a child, but Paz could imagine the man’s mind scuttling around like one of these cockroaches, trying to find a safe hole where his worldview would be safe from the clear evidence that Paz had presented. He wasn’t green like Zwick, but he was sweating and twitchy, his hands plucking, scratching at himself. “Um,” said Morales, and was saved from a more articulate response by Zwick’s loud snort.
“Oh, youcan’t be serious, Paz. That’s just stupid.”
“Why? That’s what the evidence clearly shows.”
“Then the evidence is wrong,” said Zwick. “Look, guys, if something clearlycan’t happen, and there’s evidence that ithas happened, then one of two things is true: you’ve mistaken the evidence, or you’re being hoaxed.”
“I thought science was based on evidence,” said Paz.
“To an extent. If you’re adding a data point to an established field, the evidence can be modest. If you’re upsetting the entire known order of the physical universe, you better have an enormous shitload of solid gold evidence. Which we don’t have here.”
“So we forget jumping in and out of the seven Calabi-Yau dimensions for now?”
Zwick gave him a frosty look. “Drunken speculation is one thing; believing a proposed explanation for a particular phenomenon is something else.”
“So what would make you believe what this evidence suggests?”
“Did you ever see the movieClose Encounters of the Third Kind? Yeah? Remember when the mother ship came down? There was a row of cameras rolling, they had every piece of recording apparatus known to man on site. Same thing here. If you want me to believe that an Indian turned himself into a jaguar, I want it to happen in a floodlit room. I want there to be cameras picking up the entire spectrum from infrared to gamma radiation. I want a complete telemetry suite-mass detectors, radiation detectors, electromagnetic chemosensors. I want your Indian wired to the gills, like a guy in intensive care. Then maybe, just maybe, I’ll believe it. This shit?” Here he gestured at the footprints. “I could set this up in an hour with some simple tools. If the guy who did it is any good, I bet you’ll even find jaguar hairs and DNA traces on the bodies. Fancy, but no sale.”
“Why would anyone go to all that trouble?” Paz asked.
“Hey, you’re the fucking detectives. Maybe so you’d think it was a mystical beast instead of a couple of slicks with knives and phony footprint makers, like they do at summer camp to scare the girls. When you find the guy who did it, you could ask him. I got to get out of here.” He did so, crunching the roaches in his path.
“And there you have it,” said Paz. “The world’s smartest man hath spoken.”
“You believe him?” asked Morales.
“No,you’re the detective, Tito. I’m just a superstitious Cuban cook.” He put an idiotic smile on his face, and after a moment Morales smiled, too. “Yeah, I keep forgetting,” he said. “Anyway, we’re in the county here, so I’m going to call Finnegan and let him worry about it. I’m sure it’ll make his day just like it made mine.”
Paz did not wait around for the county detectives to arrive but called a cab. He dropped Zwick off at his apartment in Coral Gables, near the university. Zwick had taken a double dose of Vicodin, dry, and was somnolent on the drive.
“Well, that was a fun day!” he said as he got out of the cab. “Let’s go fishing again real soon.”
“I’ll call you if I see that Indian,” said Paz. “See how he feels about telemetry.”
“You do that,” said Zwick sourly and limped away.
When Paz arrived at his house the smell of grilling meat was rich in the air and he felt a pang of hunger that reached down to his knees. He realized he had not had anything to eat since his predawn breakfast, and that the garage scene had effectively suppressed his appetite until just now. He went to the bathroom, stripped off his clothes, took a quick hot shower. When he left the shower, as he was drying himself, he noticed a rich odor that penetrated the scent of soap and the fainter one of the meat cooking. It came from his clothes; he had forgotten how the stink of a murder scene stuck to clothing. It was worse than cigar smoke, and his cleaning bills as a homicide detective had been astronomical. He deposited the garments in the washing machine, seized a Beck’s from the refrigerator and, now dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, went out to the back patio.
There he found his wife in a chaise, taking her ease like a duchess, while the food was prepared. This was no surprise; the Lola did not cook. What was surprising was that the grill-person was Jenny Simpson, working under the detailed supervision of Amelia Paz. The two of them were having a fine time, chortling away. Jenny looked about twelve in her new clothes, aqua shorts and a short-sleeved cotton shirt covered with blue flowers and bright green leaves.