Vanessa Winkler rolled her eyes. Her brother turned back to Schrum. “Amos, I need you. I’ve never needed anyone more.”

Schrum’s hand found Winkler’s. “Finish the project on your own, Eliot. It’s nothing to someone with your resources.”

“I CAN’T, AMOS! Without your blessed presence, it’s unsanctified. You told me that the event is stuck in time, waiting only to be released. Its release has to be engineered by a man of God.”

“I can’t even stand up, Eliot.”

“The project doesn’t need you to stand, Amos. You just have to be there to make it real. YOU HAVE TO DO IT, AMOS. IT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!”

“Oh, for shit sakes,” Vanessa Winkler muttered.

Schrum started to lift his head, but it fell back into the pillow. “The daily stress of the project … it’s not something I can manage, Eliot. Not on a daily basis … All I have is the power of my faith in God.”

“He listens to you, Amos!” Winkler beseeched. “Beg Him for strength.”

Schrum coughed and his eyes fell closed. Uttleman appeared, his face dark. “You have to leave, Eliot. The stress will kill Amos.”

Tears staining his cheeks, Eliot Winkler whirred reluctantly to the elevator. Vanessa followed, high heels ticking the floor like tack hammers. Uttleman saw the pair to the first floor, riding down in silence.

“Andy,” Uttleman said to the singer, sitting at the kitchen table and arranging sheet music, “would you escort our guests across the yard?”

Delmont scurried to catch the Winklers, now exiting the back door. When it closed, Uttleman took the lift upstairs, where Amos Schrum was sitting up in the bed. The doctor frowned at the open drapes, crossed the floor, and pulled them tight.

“He’s gone?” Schrum said.

Uttleman went to his desk and tapped keys on the desk monitor to see live video from six cameras. “Heading through the yard.”

“Where’s Andy?”

“Walking beside the Winklers and chattering like a magpie while they ignore him.”

“Think he’s coming back today?” Schrum frowned. “Andy?”

Uttleman shrugged. “What’s so important about Andy?”

“He sings and prays and doesn’t require anything.” Schrum narrowed an eye at his physician. “It’s a nice change.”

“We’re alone, Amos. And we need to talk.”

Schrum stood and angled toward the sitting area at the front of the room. “Later. I’m gonna go watch some television.”

“It’s important, Amos.”

Schrum grabbed a pint bottle of cough syrup from his bedside table and poured two ounces into a glass as his black leather slippers padded to the sitting area. He sat on a lounger, crossed his legs, tipped back the glass and finished the syrup – cherry vodka actually – in a single swig. Uttleman followed and sat on a wooden chair.

“Eliot won’t be mollified, Amos,” Uttleman said. “You better get used to him.”

Schrum started to respond, but only sighed. A sound of singing drifted from the street below. Schrum stood, crept to the front window and furtively peered around the edge of a drape. “My lord, Roland. There must be three hundred souls out there, all waiting for me to die.”

“All hating that you might die, Amos. They love you.”

Schrum’s face was impassive. He frowned toward Uttleman.

“How did I get to this point, Roland? Hiding in Key West like a schoolboy feigning the flu?”

“You were being kind to an old friend and one of your greatest backers over the years. You offered hope, was that so bad?”

Schrum held up the glass of flavored vodka. “I’d been drinking. I might have even been joking.”

“You can still pull it off, Amos. Eliot needs it bad.”

Schrum didn’t seem to hear, head canted to the choir singing to him from below. He again peered around the drape.

“Come away from the window, Amos,” Uttleman said. “They’ll see you.”

“And?”

“And they may think you’re not as ill as reports are suggesting.”

Schrum sat back down on the chair. He picked up the remote and turned on the television, Uttleman noting the selector set on a small religious cable channel out of Alabama.

“I’m starting to feel better these last couple of days, Roland. Maybe even able to return to the Jacksonville studios in a couple weeks.”

“Before that, uh, blessed event happens, Amos, I’ll need to prepare from a … a medical standpoint.”

Schrum looked tired of the train of conversation and waved Uttleman from the room. “I’m feeling an upturn, so start preparing. If you see Andy outside, tell him I could use a little entertainment. And a ham-and-cheese sandwich.”

14

The FCLE comprised two floors in Miami’s towering downtown Clark Center. Though it was the hub of municipal government, I suspected the politically attuned and sporadically Machiavellian Roy McDermott was the reason our agency had been allocated such prime airspace. The admin and upper-level investigative and legal types occupied the twenty-third floor, with the one below the province of pool investigators, support, and record-keeping.

When Roy had moved Ziggy Gershwin from the tight back room of my office to his own space, he’d kept the kid on the twenty-third floor, claiming there was no room downstairs, but I knew it was because Roy figured Gershwin was a future star, proving himself in the cases we’d closed.

Gershwin’s office was small and windowless and down a long hall past the legal team. He was at his desk, tipped back in his chair and studying reports. We’d spent a lot of time together and he seemed to have adopted some of my traits, trading in the former skate-punk garb for summer-weight jackets over T-shirts and jeans, and wearing dark running shoes, which beat the hell out of hard soles on the occasions when you had to chase lowlifes down alleys and over fences.

He looked up and grinned. “S’up, Big Ryde?”

“I need a listing of sex offenders in a fifty-mile radius, Zigs, especially those recently released from prison. Got a couple trainees you can use?”

My worst fear was that the perp had settled an old score with Sandoval, but had more scores to settle. We needed to take this monster down fast.

“Uh, no problem.”

“You sound hesitant.”

“Just thinking who I can put on it. Roy’s got me on the Menendez case, kind of on the QT.”

“Menendez? Like what?”

“The lady’s a saint, right? So no one’s looking past that. Roy wanted me to take a tiptoe through her history.”

Meaning dig into Menendez deeper than others were doing, but leave a light footprint, if any. All cop agencies have biases toward their own, and it was best outsiders handle such things.

“Understood,” I said.

“But no problem with checking the pervs,” Gershwin assured me, picking up his phone. “I’ll put Wagner and Brazano on it. They’re new, but good.”

“Gracias, amigo.”

I was thinking about Menendez as I returned to my office. It was the worst type of case: a beloved and talented public figure killed for apparently no reason, knifed down in her prime in her own home, not a shred of evidence to be found. I was pitying every MDPD detective when my cell rang: Belafonte.

“Good morning,” I said, trying for jovial to balance out my dark musings on Menendez. “How’s my favorite MDPD liaison today?”

“She just heard about a body found in the waterway in Golden Glades,” Belafonte said quietly. “She’s hearing ‘wrapped in a burnt sheet’.”

So much for starting the day on a high note. With siren and flashers pushing aside traffic, I raced there in fifteen minutes, a retiree-oriented neighborhood shaded by palms and garnished with tropical foliage. The street was blocked by a white-and-green MDPD patrol car and I continued to a brick home fronted by another cruiser, an ambulance, and mobile units from the Medical Examiner’s office and the Forensics team. Anxious residents stood at the curb and beyond them I saw Belafonte beside the canal a hundred feet behind the house, part of a highway of water running from the glades to Biscayne Bay.