The Death File: A gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist. J. Kerley A.

MIIIINE!” he screamed, kicking over an end table and lamp. The action seemed to surprise him and he stared at the fallen furniture.

      Novarro’s eyes tightened to pinpoints. “Get out, Benjamin.”

      He turned to her. “Hunh?”

      “There’s the door,” Novarro said, finger jabbing toward the entrance. “Get out of my house.”

      It took several beats for her words to make sense. Her brother tipped forward but caught himself with hands to knees. “You can’t throw me out, Tash,” he said, taking a stutter-step sideways. “Me drunk Indian.”

      “Go sleep in the goddamn alley, Geronimo. Or crawl into a trash can.”

      “Don’t be mean, Tash,” her brother said in a voice closer to twelve than twenty-one. He bent to retrieve the toppled lamp but momentum carried him to the floor. He tried to push himself up, but his arms buckled and his nose slammed the carpet.

      “I’m all fut up,” he wailed, face-down, fingers clawing at the rug like trying to get a grip on a spinning world. “I’M ALL FUT UP!”

      “Shhhh, Ben,” Novarro said gently, slipping her hands beneath his shoulders. “Come on, let’s get you to the couch.”

      She wrestled her brother to the couch and got a wastebasket from the bathroom. She pulled the area rug several feet from the couch and set the wastebasket beside him as a vomit pail. He’d miss it, of course. He always did.

      She sat in the chair across the room and stared at her brother, his eyes rolled back as he neared sleep. Fixing the toilet was just the start, the harbinger of an innate ability with mechanical systems that led to a job in an uncle’s garage at thirteen. His skills flourished in a high school geared to technical pursuits and he’d received a scholarship in mechanical engineering at Arizona State.

      He’d dropped out one semester into the program, claiming to be bored, but Novarro suspected Ben had the same problem afflicting so many lower-class kids in college: Fear that he didn’t belong in that world, that he was insufficient, miscast, hearing whispers only spoken in the mind …

       How did that one ever get in?

      Despite entreaties from his university counselor and two professors – one who took Ben under her wing like a relative – her brother went to work for a company that installed industrial HVAC systems, actually a decent job, his natural abilities impressing higher-ups from day one. But from the moment he’d quit school, the drinking and pot smoking ramped up. He fell in with a loose crew of ambition-free young men content to hang out near the res and do odd jobs, selling loose joints to needy tourists the most profitable.

      Three months later the accumulating hangovers and stink of liquor on Ben’s sweat and breath ended with a pronouncement from his supervisor.

      “We really like you, kid; you got an incredible gift. But you also got a problem. Get it fixed and we can …”

      A succession of mechanically oriented jobs followed, diminishing in complexity, the most recent reconditioning used hot-water heaters for twelve bucks an hour, a task he claimed – usually drunkenly – that a trained chimp could learn in a day.

      Novarro watched her brother until his snoring became regular and unlabored. She bent and kissed his forehead and snuggled a comforter beneath his chin. Sighing, she picked up the half-full bottle and took it to the kitchen sink and turned on the tap. When she started to tip the flask over the drain, her hand froze and she stepped back.

      Something on the far side of the planet whispered Coyote.

      Novarro retreated to the kitchen table and sat with the blood-red liquid between her and the vase of fresh flowers purchased the previous day, their soft perfume scenting the air.

      “Woo-woo,” she whispered. She tipped back the bottle and drank with surprising naturalness.

      Fifteen minutes later she was weeping like a baby.

       8

      Rather than drive from Miami to Upper Matecumbe Key, I went to the Coral Gables home of Dr Vivian Morningstar. Viv was my longest-ever significant other (the term always seemed ridiculous … other what?), our relationship entering its second year. I’d met her in the last months of her previous employment as a pathologist with the state forensics lab, but shortly thereafter Vivian had an epiphany: She needed to work with the living. Specializing in trauma medicine, she was completing her internship at Miami-Dade General, which involved long hours at the hospital and often sleeping there.

      Harry was staying at the Palace, a former hotel owned by a scumball the FCLE had busted for human trafficking. All his other confiscated properties had been sold, but Roy convinced the accountants to retain the Palace as lodging for visiting agents and consultants to stay and as a safe house for the occasional snitch wanting to stay alive.

      It was just past one a.m. when my phone rang: Vince Delmara.

      “What are you doing to me?” he said.

      “I’m not tracking,” I said, wondering if I was dreaming. “But then it’s two minutes after—”

      “I’m in a front yard in Coral Terrace, Carson. I’m looking at a body that has your and Nautilus’s cards in his shirt pocket. They’re next to a U of Miami ID. You know a Professor John Warbley?”

      My phone went off less than a minute after I hung up: Harry. Called by Vince, he was on his way to Viv’s to grab me up.

      We arrived at a single-story ranch-style house, two jacarandas up front, a bank of azaleas to the side, plus some big overhanging tree I couldn’t identify. The ME and forensics vans were in place, plus three cruisers and Vince Delmara’s black unmarked. The uniforms were working crowd control, horrified neighbors looking on as emergency lights bathed the night in pulses of white and blue and red.

      We pulled in behind a massive step van, one of the forensic department’s mobile labs and headed into the crowd, looking for Vince.

      “There he is,” Harry said, pointing to the right. We jogged over and brushed aside overhanging limbs to see the face of a man we had spoken with scant hours ago. Warbley stared into the sky with lifeless eyes, one reddened with blood seeping from burst veins, the grass beneath his head glistening with scarlet.

      “Any idea what happened?” Harry asked.

      “The rear of his skull is bashed in,” Vince said. “Something big and heavy, ball bat, hammer, rock.”

      I saw Harry wince; he’d been struck from behind some years ago, sparking a long hospital stay and convalescence.

      “Warbley worked with Angela Bowers at the U,” I said. “His specialty is medical ethics. We talked to him today.”

      “Jesus,” Vince said. “Think there’s a tie with Bowers?”

      “If not, it’s a strange coincidence.” But we’d seen strange coincidences before. Fate sometimes likes to play with you.

      “Wallet around?” Harry asked.

      “Nope. I got a tan line indicating he wears a watch most of the time. It’s not there. No phone, either, if he was carrying one.”

      Classic robbery signs. And like a lot of cops I knew there was a statistical probability that hours after interviewing Warbley, he would fall victim to an unrelated attack. But the hollow in my gut told me my belly wasn’t believing those odds, not just yet.

      “Who found him?” Harry asked.

      “Penn and Ortega,” Vince said, nodding toward one of the MDPD cruisers. “Standard patrol, Penn driving, Ortega flashing the spotlight over the houses, yards. Then they see the bottom of shoes.” Vince checked his watch. “That was at11.56.”