I’d met Roberta Menendez a couple of times, a stout and handsome woman with an unfailing smile and sparkling eyes. She had a gift for public speaking and was a flawless representative of the department.

Then, in the early hours of last Thursday, someone had broken into her home in the upper east side and put a knife in her upper abdomen. Robbery was ruled out because nothing seemed missing. The perp simply entered, killed, retreated.

It was a tragedy and I read for two minutes and set the paper aside, knowing the frustration taking place in local law enforcement, news outlets screaming for meat, leads going nowhere as live-wire electricity sizzled down the chain of command: Get this killer; get him now.

I hit Miami in mid afternoon, stopping at the downtown Clark Center before heading home to Upper Matecumbe Key. My boss, Roy McDermott, was at his desk rubber-stamping paperwork.

“Hey, Roy. Anything happening on the Menendez case?”

My boss frowned, a rare look; Roy normally resembled a magician who’d just finger-snapped a bouquet from thin air.

“Nada, Carson. MDPD’s working double shifts. They’re angry.”

“No doubt. We in?”

Roy tossed the stamp aside. “I’ve got Degan and Gershwin working with the MDPD, but everyone figures it’s MDPD’s baby, one of their own gone down. Even if our people figure it out, we’ll dish the cred to the locals. They need the boost.”

“You want me on Menendez?” I asked.

“You’re on something else,” he sighed. “Call Vince Delmara.”

Vince was a detective with MDPD, an old-school guy in his early fifties who believed in hunches and shoe leather. My call found him working the streets on the Menendez case and he asked could I meet him briefly at five, which meant Vince needed a Scotch.

We met at a hotel bar in Brickell, Miami’s financial district. Vince was dressed as always: dark suit, white shirt, bright tie and a wide-brimmed black felt Dick Tracy-style fedora, which he wore even when the temperature was a hundred in the shade. It kept the Miami sun from his face, Vince regarding sunlight as a cruel trick by the Universe. The bartender saw Vince and began pouring a Glenfiddich. I studied the taps and ordered a Bell’s Brown Ale. I started to pull my wallet but Vince waved it off.

“I’ve run a tab here since the Carter administration. You’re covered.”

I followed Vince to a booth in a far corner. There was a middling crowd, men and women in professional garb, dark suits prominent, few bodies overweight. The women tended to pretty, the men to smilingly confident. It reminded me of the book American Psycho and I wondered who kept an axe at home.

We sat and Vince set the fedora beside him on his briefcase. His hair was black and brushed straight back, which, with his dark eyes and prominent proboscis, gave him the look of a buzzard in a wind tunnel.

“You read the paper day before yesterday?” he asked.

“Out of town.”

Vince popped the clasps on his briefcase and handed me a folded Miami Herald.

“Page two, metro section.”

The table had a candle in a frame of yellow glass. I pulled it close to read five lines about a twenty-three-year-old prostitute named Kylie Sandoval found dead along a lonely stretch of beach south of the city.

“Sad, but not unusual, Vince.”

Vince rummaged in his briefcase and passed me a file. “Story’s missing a few details, Carson.” The file contained photos centering on a tubular black shape on sand studded with beach grass.

“Is that a cocoon?” I said.

“If so, this is the butterfly.” Vince passed me a second photo and I saw a woman on an autopsy table. Though her skin was charred, I discerned a caved-in cheekbone and a depression in the left temple.

“The cocoon was a thick wrapping of cloth. It was doused in accelerant and set ablaze. She was alive at the time.”

I grimaced. “She looks beat up. What’s the autopsy say?”

“Scheduled for tomorrow. The techs spent ten hours unwrapping charred strips of cloth from the corpse.”

I studied the photo. Burned alive. I had half my beer left and ordered a double bourbon chaser.

“How’d you make the ID?” I asked.

“One hand was balled into a fist, which protected several fingertips from the fire. Kylie Sandoval had a record of hooking, shoplifting, two possession busts, one for crack, one for heroin.”

“What are you looking at, Vince?” Meaning which direction was the investigation headed.

“Nothing right now.”

It took a second to sink in. “Every investigative resource is on the Menendez case.”

Vince’s eyes were hound-dog sad. “I’ve never seen a shitstorm like this, Carson. The press is shitting on the Chief, the Chief’s shitting on the assistant chiefs, the assistant—”

“Been there. And it’s all landing on the detectives.”

“No one’s gonna give a dead hooker a second glance until Menendez gets cleared. Can you help me here?”

“Who’ll I work with at MDPD? You got a detective ready?”

When Roy created the agency a few years ago, he wanted to avoid the antipathy between law-enforcement entities often arising when one swept in and took over, the hated FBI effect. To ameliorate some of the potential conflict, the FCLE always tried to partner with the local forces and detectives.

Vince said, “Investigative’s not going to spare an investigator for Sandoval right now.”

“I’m gonna need a liaison to MDPD, a detective.”

Vince sucked the last of his Scotch, rattled ice as his brow furrowed in thought. “I got an idea, Carson. If it works you’ll have a face in your office tomorrow. How well do you speak English?”

“Uh, what?”

But Vince was up and moving back out into the Menendez merde-storm.

Hoping to put something inside my head besides photos of a young woman’s fiery end, I pulled my phone, fingers crossed.

“Is this my personal detective?” said Vivian Morningstar in a pseudo-sultry voice that always quickened my breathing.

“Ready to detect anything on your person,” I acknowledged. “I’m in town. Is tonight a good night?”

The lovely Miz M had been my significant other – if that was the parlance – for almost a year, a record on my part. Until eleven months ago Vivian was a top-level pathologist with the Florida Medical Examiner’s Department, Southern Division, which basically served the lower third of the state. She’d had an epiphany and decided to “work with the living”. Much of the past year had thus been crammed with courses at Miami U’s Miller School of Medicine, where she was working on a specialty in Emergency Medicine.

“I’m an intern, which means rented mule. I finished day shift, now I’m on night shift. You’re staying at my place tonight?”

Vivian had recently commenced her residency at Miami-Dade General Hospital, where the 65,000-square-foot emergency center treated upwards of 75,000 patients annually, the work often involving thirty-plus-hour stints, catching sleep on a tucked-away gurney. Between the haphazard hours of our jobs, we managed to see one another about twice a week, me generally staying with Viv in the city.

“Got a case I need to hit hard in the early a.m. You don’t want details. You off tomorrow night?”

It seemed tomorrow would work out fine and I drove to Viv’s home, a lovely two-story in Coral Gables, the walls’ white expanses broken by vibrant art and photography. When we’d began dating, I’d figured her home shone with so much life because her work held so much death.

I started to pull the case files again, but their horror seemed discordant in Viv’s home, so I mixed a drink and reviewed them beneath a lamp in the back yard, nothing above but the lonely stars, which I figured had seen it all before.

4

Harry Nautilus was half-reclined on his couch and listening to a YouTube upload of a performance by jazz great Billie Holiday and thinking her voice was a trumpet, the words not sung as much blown through that life-ravaged throat, some notes low and growled, others bright as a bell on a crisp winter morning.