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

be alive right now.”

      “You were here first … what was the entry point?”

      “No break-in that anyone found yet. A door got left unlocked. People get careless.”

      Novarro crossed the room. She’d seen a sign out front advising of a security system, which meant a control panel. Novarro found it in the closet nearest the door. The green power supply light was on.

      “Was the system armed when you arrived, Sergeant?”

      “Turned off by Sanchez. She has a card key.”

      “What else appears missing?”

      “There’s an empty space on the vic’s desk where a computer was. Desk drawers open, emptied.”

      Novarro pointed across the room. “Yet right there sits a Sony Bravia … what? Fifty-inch flat-screen TV? About a grand, right?”

      Castle shrugged. “The perp or perps killed the vic and started bagging up shit, but got spooked by something. A cop siren maybe, heading to some other problem in your, uh …” a hint of grin, “mixed neighborhood.”

      “Must have been a real scare, Sergeant Castle,” Novarro said, leaning against the wall and giving Castle an indulgent look. “The doc’s wearing a Movado watch, five-six hundred bills or so. Would have taken two seconds to pop off and pocket.”

      Castle jammed his hands into his pant pockets and scanned the ceiling for several seconds. “OK, so fuck my idea. What’s yours, Three-Point?”

      The name froze Novarro, but only for a split second. She studied the body on the floor before walking to the sliding glass door and tugging with a gloved finger. “There’s an old Tohono O’odham Indian saying, Merle,” she said. “‘O’nota’y’tanga olemano.’”

      Castle rolled his eyes. “Meaning?”

      Novarro stared at a black vulture circling against a blue sky. Somehow the bastards always knew.

      “I’ll get there when I get there.”

       3

      The nameplate on my door said, Carson Ryder, Investigative Consultant, Senior Status. The title was an invention of my boss at the Florida Center for Law Enforcement. Being a “consultant” got me out of the stultifying barrage of administrative meetings and other make-work tasks associated with any bureaucracy, even one headed by the bureaucrat-averse Roy McDermott. “Senior status” pretty much allowed me to do whatever I wished, as long as the end result was a better, safer Florida.

      On my first day, Roy had said, “I don’t really care what my people do, Carson. All I ask is that it stay within legal bounds and lets me stamp ‘Case Closed’ on a shitload of files.”

      So far, I hadn’t let him down.

      Outside my twenty-third story window lay the jagged and glittering skyline of Miami, the gemlike turquoise blue of Biscayne Bay in the distance. I was unable to appreciate the beauty, sitting at my desk and filling out reports, grumbling that for all my status bought me, I still had to do paperwork just like a beat cop in Mobile, Alabama, which is how I started.

      My phone rang – mobile, not landline – telling me I probably knew the caller, which I did: Vince Delmara, a top homicide detective with the Miami-Dade County PD. We had been friends since my first case for the FCLE, almost three years ago. Vince was old-school, the best aspects at least, believing that experience, hunches, and shoe leather were what solved cases.

      And sometimes just plain dumb luck.

      “Question, Carson …” Vince said, jumping right in. “You still seeing that shrink in Miami Beach … Dr Angela Bowers?”

      I threw my pencil to the desk and leaned back. “What you talking about, Vince?”

      “You see a lot of crazy bullshit,” Vince said sotto voce, like sharing a secret. “It’s all right to visit a therapist. Anyway, I ain’t gonna tell no one.”

      “Right now, I’m thinking I’m not the one needs a shrink, bud.”

      A sigh. “You’re really not seeing a psychologist, are you, Carson?”

      “I think I scare them. You got a point here, Vince?”

      “I got a problem. You busy, or can you meet up?”

      Five minutes later I slipped on a blue linen sport jacket to cover the shoulder rig, dusted eraser rubber from my blue jeans, and headed out, hoping paperwork faeries slipped in to finish my drudgery.

      The offices of the Florida Center for Law Enforcement were on floors twenty-two and twenty-three of Miami’s towering downtown Clark Center, the upper location for administrators and top investigators, the lower floor for mid-echelon investigators and support staff. On the way to the elevator I stuck my head into a small office being painted and prepped by a maintenance staffer: dropcloths on half the floor, a ladder, a couple cans of paint.

      A painter was crouched in a corner and painting the floor molding.

      “The guy who was here …?” I said.

      The painter frowned. “He left. Said I was whistling out of tune.”

      I continued to a conference room and looked through the glass window to see fellow investigator, Lonnie Canseco, meeting with a pair of forensics accountants from the Tallahassee office. Cold: Not what I was looking for. Onward to a smaller conference room, this one with an FCLE operations manual on the round table, the empty pushed-back chair hung with a purple blazer, size 44 long.

      Getting warmer.

      I jogged back to the painting-in-progress office, checked for a gray canvas bag beside the desk. Not there, which meant I was warmer still. I took the back staircase to the floor below and pushed through a metal door, entering another door to the rear and smelling sweat and body heat. Angling past a partition I looked across a white-tiled expanse to see the black expanse of Harry Nautilus, pulling on his pants beside a naked white guy.

      Hot. I turned to the nude guy, Larry Vincente. “How long was it, Larry?”

      Vincente grinned from earlobe to earlobe. “Almost nine.”

      I shot a thumbs-up as Vincente shut off the shower nozzle and stepped to a rack to grab a towel. Like most pool investigators Vincente spent about a dozen hours a day working cases and the FCLE’s small gym was a place to grab a quick, stress-reducing workout: a half-dozen strength machines, plus stationary bikes and treadmills. Vincente tried to get in six treadmill miles a day, but today had managed nearly nine – either a slow day or a fast run.

      “Let’s boogie, amigo,” I said to Harry, now dressed and cramming sweaty shorts and tee into the gray gym bag. “It’s time to meet Vince Delmara.”

      Harry splashed on a palmful of 4711 cologne, light and floral and antithetical to the wet heat of a South Florida summer. “Delmara? The Miami detective who’s afraid of the sun.”

      I made a biting gesture. “It’s the vampire in him.”

      “Can’t wait.”

      Ten minutes later we were racing toward Coral Gables in my moss-green Range Rover Defender. Fully equipped for a safari, it rode hard, ate gas, had a manual transmission prone to sticking, and the AC wasn’t quite up to the Miami heat, but if a case ever took me to the African veldt, I was ready.

      “You say this thing belonged to a drug lord?” Harry yelled above the siren as we blew down I-95.

      “Confiscated. I found it in the motor pool.”

      “When you gonna paint it with a roller?”

      Harry was referring to my former ride back in Mobile, a battered pickup I’d repainted gray with ship paint and