It is his baby.
This girl sitting next to him is not. But she does not know it yet. She does not know at all. They travel down the turnpike a while. He turns up the radio to fill the silent space. He understands her fear.
She is not used to the streets, he thinks. She is someone’s daughter. As he glances at her, her face wears a distant look. She is thinking of things gone by—a family, a safe place, a pink bedroom, a roof over her head.
He can see from the look on her face that she is wondering how all of this happened to her. How had she made the choices that got her to this point in her life? Sitting in the cab of this eighteen-wheeler, going somewhere with a total stranger. A man who will rape her for money.
A man who will make her feel used, useless and soiled.
He figures he will get her out of this mood. “So, what’s your name, sugar?”
“Sarah,” she says.
Her name makes him remember the Hall and Oates song “Sara Smile” from the eighties. He always liked that song.
My beautiful Sara, won’t you smile?
He wishes she would smile. She doesn’t.
She knows what is coming. Or thinks that she does.
Eventually, they pull off at an exit in the Everglades. He drives the truck for a while until he finds a secluded spot. He parks.
He turns his massive frame toward her. He can see sorrow in her pretty face. Her owl eyes are sad and distant. He puts his thumb and forefinger on her chin, startling her.
“Don’t,” is all she can manage to say.
“It’s okay. I promise I won’t hurt you.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I won’t. You’re far too pretty.”
Sara, won’t you smile?
“No kisses, okay?” She says it not as a question but as a command.
He understands. It is an unspoken rule on the streets. She’s been through so much already. Even though she is new to the street, it is already taking a toll on her psyche.
It is a sorrowful thing. To see a young girl so broken down.
Sarah, smile for me.
But he has no time for sorrow. He knows what he needs. He needs to be inside of her. He needs to dominate her. Control her.
He puts his monster hand back on her thigh, runs his fingers under the seam of her skirt. He can feel the seam stitching over his fingers. The lace of her panties under his fingertips. More important, the feel of her skin. Soft. Smooth to his touch.
Yes, at least physically she has not been destroyed by the streets or drugs yet. As he touches her, he can feel her pull away ever so slightly.
“I won’t hurt you,” he whispers as he draws closer to her. As he says it, his left palm goes for her breasts. As he draws in toward her neck, she turns away, as if she can’t stand the sight of him.
He understands this reaction. He has seen it many times before. His sheer size scares people away, especially women.
But he is paying her to be here. She shouldn’t be scared.
He runs his fingers under her skin-tight cotton blouse, under her bra, and catches her nipple. It is small and tight and firm, just as he thought it would be. He squeezes it, watching for her reaction.
Her legs draw together slightly under his other palm.
“It’s all right,” he says again.
She is crying just a little now. Trying to hide her despair.
He rips her shirt open. The buttons fly off. Suddenly, he is on her, stripping her bra away. She is naked from the waist up. She refuses to scream.
Tough girl.
Her wide eyes grow wider. Her pupils focus on him.
“I thought you said . . .” She looks at him, pleading.
“I did say it, but I didn’t mean it,” he growls.
Now he rips through her panties; he hikes up her leather skirt over her waist. He is in her in a second, grabbing her and holding her down.
She screams, “Get off, get off.” But in the Florida Everglades, there is no one to hear her. But the alligators.
With a single blow, he knocks her out. Another blow shatters her jaw. He rapes her repeatedly, until he is satisfied.
Then he pulls up his pants, opens the passenger-side door and rolls her limp body out. He listens as her body splashes into a canal that leads into the vast Everglades. Soon alligators and the water will make sure there will be nothing left of her or that what little remains will be of little use to anyone.
Sara smile.
He zips up his fly, turns over the ignition. Feeling the rig’s power underneath him, he enjoys it now more than he ever has. And pulls away.
CHAPTER TWO
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
The flight from Ambergris Caye in Belize takes an eternity. Cat and Joey sit in a cramped sixteen-seat propeller plane. Joey is fascinated by the pilot at the controls—seeing the man skillfully manage the twenty-minute journey as the crosswinds move and shift the aircraft in flight. Cat tries to concentrate on the distance outside the plane’s small oval window. The water moves from turquoise to deep blue farther out, dotted here and there with clumps of mangroves and sand, the early beginnings of islands. With each up-and-down movement, Cat feels her stomach follow suit. She has never been a good flyer. She looks out the plane’s window to try to take her mind off her stomach. Below, periodically, there are dark shadows in the water. She tries but cannot make out what they are. Marine life of some kind, no doubt.
She feels a darkness encompass her soul as she and Joey leave this light-filled place of sun and surf. As she looks around the aircraft’s cramped quarters, she notices that many tourists seem hungover or just plain upset that they are going home too. Back to cold and snow.
With a one-hour layover in Miami and a long flight to Virginia, Cat can’t wait to get to Quantico. Once again, as always when they get home, Joey listens to her shower and change her clothes. Gone are the beach shorts, swimsuits and flip-flops.
From the look on Joey’s face, Cat can see his mood changing as they get closer to the realities of home life. Gone is the carefree little boy. There is a deep brooding in his face. He knows what it means as he hears his mother hurrying to shower and change into her work clothes. She knows what it means. She will be gone again, with no idea when she will return. Cat watches tears fill Joey’s eyes as she walks him over to the neighbor’s house. He says nothing on the walk over. Cat wishes they were still sitting on the beach in Belize, looking at the water, smelling the ocean breeze.
But that is not reality.
This is.
This is the gritty reality of Cat’s life. This is what she has chosen for herself. This endless dance between good and evil, between life and death. Between good outcomes and horrific ones.
“I wish you didn’t have to go . . .” It’s the last thing that Joey says to her. These words haunt her as she leaves her son. She tries not to think of them as she offers Joey some reassurances that she will be home soon. “I wish you didn’t have to go . . .” She runs these words in Joey’s soft, sad voice through her mind over and over as a cab takes her to the airport.
There is nothing that I can do.
No words I could have said to him make this any better.
The flight to Quantico is uneventful. Cat sleeps most of the way because of the time difference with Belize.
As soon as Cat arrives at Quantico, Nate starts to fill her in on the details.
This body is number four. Another one on the Florida Interstate 75 that links Naples and the Fort Lauderdale/Miami area. The highway is affectionately known to the locals as “Alligator Alley.” Two of the others were prostitutes as well, working girls from the streets. But the first body does not fit that pattern, Nate explains. The first one is not a prostitute. She is, or was, a legal secretary who worked in downtown Fort Lauderdale at one of the big law firms. She lived in Pembroke Pines, a sleepy suburb south and inland of Fort Lauderdale. Her body was dumped and found in one of the s
alt-water-filled ditches off the Intracoastal Waterway. That was a month ago. Nate says there have been three more since then. All off them off of I-75. All prostitutes.
Nate looks down and away, as if talking about the girls affects him. Cat knows from their many conversations, it does affect him. But he tries not to let it show.
Cat looks him dead in the eyes. “Were there any similarities with the victims?”
“Yes, all had very long, silky, dark hair. All were new to ‘the profession.’ They hadn’t been ravaged by drugs, alcohol or beaten up yet. They were runaways trying to make do, except the first one.”
So, there is a pattern. Something this perp is looking for. What made victim number one different? What had caused her to be his first victim? The first kill.
Cat had a million questions, like always.
For that matter, were they even dealing with a “he” or an extremely aggressive, large and strong “she”? At this point in the investigation, nothing can be taken for granted and nothing ruled out.
No answers, only more questions right now.
It is always like this when an investigation is just beginning. It is a big jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces seem to fit together. None of the pieces intersect. Not yet.
CHAPTER Three
The body says what words cannot.
—Martha Graham, interview, The New York Times,
March 31, 1985
Water does terrible things to the human body, especially water that is filled with alligators. At the Fort Lauderdale Broward County coroner’s office, Cat views the remains of Jane Doe Number Three. Cat knows the identity of the first victim, so this was Jane Doe Number Three.
Alligators have partially eaten the body. Salt water and the Florida Everglades have done the rest.
The public believed that people, or bodies, came out of the water looking pristine and beautiful. Cat knows it is not so. Water is the great eraser. It washes away DNA and identifiers and almost everything else that a good forensic pathologist looks for. It makes identification extremely difficult. The most brilliant and shrewd killers dump their victims in water because they know these truths.
Water washes away everything.
Jane Doe Number Three’s eyes are wide. Only one eyeball remains in its socket. The other is a big empty hole, behind it brain matter, cleaned white from the mixture of salt water and freshwater that exists in the Everglades.
Cat begins the recitation of the girl’s autopsy like every other. Wearing an oxygen mask and protective clothing, she checks the corpse’s toe tag to verify this is indeed Jane Doe Number Three. Her entire left arm and right leg up to the knee are gone—gator bait.
“This poor child,” Cat says to herself, instinctively, into her mask. She does not think the morgue assistant can hear her words.
Cat speaks into a small mike right next to her mouth. “Verification of Jane Doe Number Three. Toe tag number 2018-364-2913. She appears to be a well-nourished female in her late teens. She was found by a trucker floating in one of the waterways off Florida’s Alligator Alley on the evening of March 15. The body appears to be in a mild state of decomposition indicating it was dumped between 1 and 3 days ago.”
Cat measures height and weight and makes note of them. The body has already been X-rayed. Cat notes that the right jawbone appears to have been broken. The killing blow perhaps or something else? She photographs the body—both faceup and, with the help of the morgue assistant, facedown.
They work to flip the body back over without doing too much damage to it.
Cat continues her recitation.
This girl’s face has taken on an irregular bloated appearance because of adipocere—a result of her body’s fatty tissue reacting with water to develop a waxy yellowish substance. Cat knows it is really a form of insoluble soap. It was one of the reasons that drowning victims were often referred to as “floaters.” Cat knows the stuff floats and has a stench beyond words or description. She hates the word “floater.” It dehumanizes the person. She never uses it.
This is Jane Doe Number Three.
This is a person.
Even if she doesn’t have a name yet, she is not a floater.
Cat continues her work, assessing the condition of the girl’s face.
She has family searching for her.
Someone out there loves her.
Someone out there is searching for her.
Trying to bring her home.
No use taking fingerprints, as that part of this girl’s body has dissolved into this fatty tissue.
“The body was found floating naked facedown. Gators appear to have ravaged the extremities. The left arm is entirely missing up to the shoulder blade and the right leg is missing up to the femur. By the looks of it, the raggedness of the bite marks”—Cat photographs as she speaks—“gators have taken these body parts.”
Cat pauses, imagining the alligators having their way with her. She hopes that at that time, this girl was already dead. She knows that was probably the case, since gators tend to drown their victims in an underwater “death roll” before doing much else.
“The left eyeball is missing from its socket.”
Cat observes the body closely. Although it is bloated from being in the salt water, there are no obvious signs of identification on the skin. No track marks, no puncture wounds, no tattoos or other obvious identifiers except the corpse’s long straight brown hair, which goes all the way down beyond the girl’s waist. The right-hand forefinger has a gold ring on it—encrusted with what appear to be five red rubies in the shape of a flower. Cat photographs the ring from multiple angles.
“Who is searching for you, honey?” Cat says to the body without thinking much of it. She does this sometimes, lost in the moment. Lost in her work.
The body is illuminated under strong fluorescent lights against the stainless-steel table. A sole eye that looks up but cannot see the lights above. Nor can this girl hear the dim hum of the high-volume AC that constantly pumps high-quality oxygen into the room, while pulling out all odors and chemicals.
Cat makes a Y incision from the girl’s shoulder blades down and across the chest plate, then down to the swollen corpse’s abdomen. Once again, the aftermath of being in salt water shows itself as she opens the body to see inside.
Cat draws blood for a toxicology run. Judging from a lack of track marks, this girl does not appear to be hooked on anything. But that does not negate the possibility that she ingested something without knowing it.
No fluid in the lungs. This tells Cat that this girl did not drown. While Cat can see water and weeds in the back of the throat, there are none in the girl’s lungs. They are clean and clear. To Cat, this means that she was killed, or at least knocked out, before her body was dumped into the water. Whoever did this had broken her jaw before she was dumped. She had not drowned out there in the Florida swamp.
Cat knows in her heart that this girl died before the alligators got to her. In truth, the two greatest human fears are being burned and being eaten alive. She knows that this girl did not endure the second. No victim should have to endure that horror.
Carefully, Cat removes the internal organs from the body in the order she was taught so many years ago in medical school. First, the lungs, heart, esophagus and trachea. Cat notes a crush injury to the girl’s trachea. Yet another sign of assault by someone bigger and stronger. Then, the abdominal organs, one after another—liver, spleen, kidney and the adrenal glands, as well as the stomach and intestines. The last two are relatively free of material. The lack of contents or food remains in this girl’s stomach tells Cat she had not eaten in a while.
Cat takes a sample from each organ for the lab.
Cat carefully examines the girl’s genitals. Because of the condition of the body, Cat cannot tell if she was raped. But Cat suspects it. Unfortunately, salt water has washed away the perp’s DNA.
Cat finishes with the torso, moves her attention back to the girl’s deformed and bloated face.
Cat notes again that this girl’s jaw does not set right. It does not align properly. The lower jaw is set to the left of the upper jaw. To Cat, this indicates she has been hit hard in the face, a brutal overhand punch from the sheer force of it. This blow from right to left broke her jaw. No bruising is evident because the water has long washed that away. But she was beaten. Another clue to this killer’s intentions and what makes him tick.
Violence makes him tick.
Breaking this girl’s jaw made him tick.
Beating up on this little girl made him tick.
Dumping young girls for gator bait makes him tick.
Cat feels angry. As many autopsies as she has done, sometimes they just seem personal. This one is personal, although she cannot say why, not yet anyway. It is her sixth sense kicking in. There will be more girls like this. More helpless little girls for him to beat, kill and leave for dead.
Even though Cat has no DNA evidence, she is sure he raped her too. Why else would he pick up prostitutes? They are easy pickings. Even if someone had seen something, prostitutes and pimps never go to the cops. This perp knows this as sure as he knows there are alligators in the Florida swamp.
Cat knows this perp could care less for these girls.
They are just meat to him.
CHAPTER FOUR
To do a great right, do a little wrong.
—Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice,
Act 4, scene 1
This time, Cat books into the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. Sitting in the heart of Millionaire’s Row and right on the beach, the massive white hotel was made famous by the opening scene in the 1964 James Bond film, Goldfinger, in which Agent 007 interferes with Goldfinger’s rigged poolside game of gin rummy. The hotel still holds that same old-world flair. Even after undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation in 2008, it is as if these buildings still hold the spirits of 1950s mobsters and 1960s swingers. There is an old-school charm about it, all the way down to the restaurants.
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