‘Meantime, all we need is a credible insomniac,’ Sam said, ‘with twenty-twenty vision and a pair of camera binoculars.’
‘With zoom,’ Martinez added.
The victims’ faces came back to both men. The torture-style cord around Molly Burton’s neck. No further information yet about her uncle, or any other next of kin.
Sam stirred himself out of negativity.
They did have something.
The message to him – a cop whose private life had gotten into the public domain more than once over the years. Which might therefore have been written in malice or as a threat – or merely to mislead.
Whatever its intent, it was evidence that might yield as much or more than those four poor people and the scene.
‘Let’s go,’ Sam said.
‘Where?’ Martinez asked.
‘To get this investigation moving,’ Sam said.
Cathy’s first sighting of Gabe had been during her first dinner shift.
Good waiters were supposed to blend in, but she had noticed him immediately – in the three-second hiatus she’d had before Jacques Carnot, the rôtisseur, had dispatched her to the linen store for a clean apron.
‘Vite!’ he’d yelled, and after that she’d forgotten about the young man, with scarcely enough time to draw breath, and by the time her shift was over, he and the others had gone for the night, and anyway, Cathy didn’t think she’d ever felt so tired in her life.
‘Are you OK to get home alone?’ Luc had asked her.
Living in the small top floor apartment above the restaurant – another, much larger residence on the third, one of the boss’s homes, rumor had it, generally unoccupied – it was to be part of Luc’s duty to take over the closing rituals, logging any problems, checking equipment and hygiene and, most crucially, lowering the shutters, locking up and setting the alarm.
‘Sure,’ Cathy had answered his question.
‘I never thought I’d say this,’ Luc had said, ‘but I’m too exhausted to eat.’
‘But we survived,’ Cathy had said.
‘For now,’ Luc had replied.
She’d been jogging early next day, a gray, misty March morning, when she saw him again.
She’d meandered around the port, going gently, had passed the Palais des Festivals and was moving along the Promenade de Pantiero, the broad walkway between the Croisette and the beach – and there he was, the guy from last evening’s shift, strolling toward her.
He wore a white T-shirt, jeans, sneakers and a thin parka, his brown hair longer than she’d thought, had probably been tied back for work, his face lean, and there was a particular grace about him that made her catch her breath.
He smiled as he recognized her, straight into her eyes.
They both halted, a few feet apart.
‘You’re an athlete,’ he said.
‘You’re American,’ she said, surprised.
‘And so are you,’ he said, teasingly, and put out his right hand. ‘Gabe Ryan.’
‘Cathy Becket.’ She liked his grip.
‘This year’s winner,’ he said. ‘From Miami Beach.’
‘And you?’
‘From here now.’ He smiled. ‘Originally from Boston.’ He paused. ‘You do this every morning?’
‘If I can.’
‘Going west’s even better.’ Gabe Ryan nodded toward the area called La Bocca. ‘Great views of the Estérel mountains.’ He paused. ‘Breakfast tomorrow?’
‘Sure.’ Cathy felt a small kick in her stomach, recognized instantly how long it had been since that had happened. ‘Where?’
‘The beach? Anyplace along here.’ He gestured toward the sand.
‘Do they allow eating?’ She thought of Miami Beach and the long list of regulations posted at intervals all along the expanse of public beach.
‘I’ll bring the coffee and croissants, and I guess we’ll find out.’
‘Are you working tonight?’ she asked.
‘Not tonight,’ Gabe Ryan said, and walked on.
She’d come next morning armed with two Tupperware eco-bottles of OJ, not sure that he’d show, but he’d been waiting for her, sitting crosslegged on the sand with croissants in a napkin-lined straw panier – feather-light and buttery, she discovered – and a pot of delicious dark jelly.
‘Wild blackberries,’ he told her.
‘Where can I buy some?’
‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘I made it.’
‘Now I’m impressed,’ Cathy said.
‘Hey, you squeezed oranges.’
Cathy grinned. ‘And later, I may be scrubbing prep tables or shaving truffles.’
‘Who knew?’ Gabe’s brown eyes were dancing.
‘Knew what?’
‘That truffles grow beards.’
‘Only the females,’ Cathy said.
‘Matter of fact’ – Gabe stretched out – ‘I went truffle hunting with a friend’s dog last year.’
And so their first real conversation had continued gently and easily on that cool, early March morning, the coffee pleasantly warming, and by the time they’d gone their separate ways, Gabe knew that Cathy lived in Sunny Isles Beach and that she’d found an apartment here in rue Saint-Antoine; and Cathy knew that Gabe worked four evenings a week at the restaurant and that he and a friend ran a stall at Forville Market every Tuesday to Sunday, that generally his friend set up at around six a.m. and Gabe took over from ten till one.
Beyond that, she knew nothing.
Not even the name – or gender – of the friend.
But she liked what she did know.
Which had thrown her because there was no doubting that she had found Gabe physically attractive, which was kind of extraordinary in itself, given that since Kez Flanagan had blown into and out of her life, Cathy had semi-accepted that she was gay. Never an absolute conviction, because though her love for sad, psychotic Kez had been very real, she also knew that the other woman had psychologically overwhelmed her.
No one significant before or since. Till Gabe Ryan.
He was so easy to be with. Even the sense of mystery that remained seemed delicious, in no way disturbing, certainly not threatening.
They’d made love for the first time in her small apartment after Cathy had made moules marinière, and seeing him naked beside her, Gabe was even more beautiful than she’d first realized. Except that in the midst of sex, right at the nub of early arousal, a memory of Kez flew back into her mind, because the fact was, a woman had given her the first powerful orgasm of her life, and Cathy still remembered the sense that she had come home …
‘Hey,’ Gabe had nudged her. ‘Come back.’
She’d told him she was sorry and he’d kissed her, said it was fine.
‘But if you want to talk about where you went …’
‘No,’ Cathy had said. ‘I don’t. It’s gone. I’m here.’
And it was true, because this was immeasurably different – and oh, Lord, she wanted this to be different in so many ways.
She had looked at Gabe in the light from the small open window.
Looked at his body, then back up at his face, studying angles, shadows, lines.
‘Hey,’ he’d said, and kissed her again. And then there were no more words or even thoughts. Only feelings, sensations, emotions; the rest of the world vaporizing into space.
Only Gabe now, inside her, all around her.
They had begun setting up for a major case in the squad room. Just Sam and Martinez for now, focusing on the windshield message. Everything to play for during the first twenty-four hours, and if the neighborhood canvassing got so much as a sniff of something, they’d be back on Stillwater Drive post haste.
A lot of grim things would happen this Monday – a holiday for some, but not the investigators – as postmortems got underway and shattered relatives suffered through the nightmare of identification and full realization. Those life-wrecking moments taking place in the Family Grieving Room at the Joseph H. Davis Center for Fore
nsic Pathology; a good building, the visitors’ areas sympathetically thought out and designed, but still the morgue.
Sam didn’t envy the ME investigators who dealt with the mourners at that time, though their own job was often little better. They treated those poor grieving people with gentleness and respect – then began perpetrating their own brand of professional cruelty by persuading them to share secrets, sometimes intimate details, stripping off outer layers, another kind of violation of the victims in their quest to find answers.
To discover enemies, ideally: to discover who had wanted the Burtons dead – and perhaps Mary Ann and Pete Ventrino too, unless they’d been just so much collateral damage.
For now, they’d put the basics up on whiteboards.
Crime scene photos of the victims, names, ages, occupations.
Gary Burton, thirty-three, proprietor of a fitness club. Molly Burton, thirty, bookkeeper, working for her uncle. Pete Ventrino, thirty-four, mechanic with his own workshop. Mary Ann Ventrino, thirty-two, homemaker and mother.
On another board, a blown-up copy of the message left for Sam.
‘So who’s Virginia?’ Martinez said, his feet up on a desk, staring up at the signature: ‘Love Virginia’.
‘I don’t think it’s a person.’ Sam sat astride a chair close to the boards. ‘I think it’s part of the statement. Maybe of the game.’
‘Game’. A word he’d come to hate, because so many of the psychos they’d come up against over the years seemed to exult in game-playing. But this particular piece of significance had struck Sam as soon as he’d read the message.
‘You ever hear of Loving v. Virginia?’
Martinez’s forehead furrowed. ‘You told me about it – they made a movie?’
‘They did, but I learned about it from my dad a long time ago.’
Born Samuel Lincoln, he’d been seven years old and injured in the accident that had killed his father – a Miami policeman – his mother and little sister, when David Becket, a Jewish pediatrician, had first encountered him. A year later, the doctor and his wife, Judy, had adopted him and lengthened his name to Samuel Lincoln Becket. David had taken pains to research their new son’s heritage, had learned that Sam was a descendant of a runaway slave from Georgia, and after that David had made a point of studying African-American history alongside Sam.
Hence, his fascination with Loving v. Virginia, a huge landmark case concerning a couple named Mildred and Richard Loving: Mildred of African and Native American descent, Richard a white man. The couple had left Virginia – where state law banned mixed marriages – in the late fifties to be married in DC, but when they’d arrived back home, they’d been arrested.
‘Bottom line,’ Sam told Martinez now, ‘after a whole string of law suits, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the convictions, but finally, almost ten years after the marriage, the US Supreme Court ruled against Virginia.’
Martinez shook his head, looked back up at the whiteboard. ‘So you really think this is some sick racist fuck playing name games?’
‘Seems to fit right in with the rest of the message.’ Sam stood up and wrote, in marker pen, Loving v. Virginia to the right of the windshield letter. ‘And it suggests that maybe if the Burtons’ friends hadn’t been there, they’d still be alive.’
Martinez’s sharp dark eyes were grim. ‘I don’t like that it’s addressed to you. Or the “I can’t stop you all”.’
Sam sat down at the table, opened his laptop, typed something into Google.
‘I hate to say it, man,’ Martinez said, ‘but I think maybe, just this one time, Kovac might be right. Maybe you do need to be home with Grace until we catch these scumbags.’
‘Now either hell really did freeze over’ – the unmistakable nasal twang of Ron Kovac’s voice said from behind them – ‘or I just heard one of my two most esteemed detectives saying I was right?’ He raised both hands. ‘Sorry, might be right.’
Sam went on typing for another moment, then sat back. ‘Are you planning on taking the case away from me, Lieutenant?’
‘No.’ Kovac sat down. ‘Just expressing my concerns. Not just for you, but for your wife and son.’ He regarded the boards. ‘In the circumstances.’
Sam looked at the lieutenant, trying to believe him, finding it hard.
‘I think it’s a threat,’ Kovac went on. ‘The captain and I have talked it over, and he’s concerned too.’
Sam took a moment, bit down on the anger that he knew he ought to be directing at the killers, not the men on his side, even Kovac.
‘I’ll talk to Grace tonight,’ he said.
‘Good,’ Kovac said. ‘Maybe talk about taking some measures.’
‘Best measure I can think of,’ Sam said, ‘is catching these bastards.’
‘True enough.’ Kovac looked at what Sam had written beside the note. ‘What’s that about?’
‘Famous civil rights case,’ Martinez told him. ‘Sam thinks the message writer was just playing a game with the signature.’
‘So you have nothing,’ Kovac said. ‘Not even a real name.’
‘Motivation,’ Sam said. ‘Not much else yet.’
‘Best carry on then,’ Kovac said. ‘And talk to your lovely wife, Detective.’
Sam waited till he’d left the room, then tapped his keyboard to restore his screen. ‘So we know the message was printed in a font called Baskerville.’
‘Like the hound,’ Martinez said.
Sam nodded, then read aloud: ‘The refined feeling of the typeface makes it an excellent choice to convey dignity and tradition. Created by a John Baskerville, who used it to print a Bible.’
‘So a religious nut, maybe?’
‘The font’s used by a university in the UK and Castleton State College up in Vermont …’ He read on. ‘Modified version also used by the Canadian government in some corporate identity program.’
‘Religious nut or Canadian professor,’ Martinez joked grimly.
‘There’s certainly a preachy, fundamentalist feel.’
‘So possibly a religious, pontificating, slaughtering sonofabitch.’
‘With followers.’ Sam was deadly serious. ‘Bought or persuaded. Fanatical, maybe.’
‘Let’s hope bought,’ Martinez said. ‘Maybe with the proceeds of the robbery. Might make them easier to trace, and I’d take a hit squad over fanatics any day.’
‘I’d take either,’ Sam said, ‘so long as we put them away.’
His cell phone rang. Detective Cutter calling.
‘Putting you on speaker, Mary.’
‘Possible eye witness,’ she told them. ‘One of the Rosenblatts’ neighbors – who don’t know where they’ve gone, by the way. But the husband, Mr Philip Blauner, answered our first knock, said he hadn’t seen or heard anything, was watching TV, and his wife had been out all evening at her sister’s, took a sleeping pill when she got home and was still out for the count.’
‘Any chance you could cut to it, Cutter?’ Martinez said.
‘Mrs Elaine Blauner found us ten minutes ago, says she came home earlier than her husband thought, says she did take a look out of their bedroom window before she took her pill, and she thinks she might have seen them leaving.’
‘Them?’ Sam said.
‘Four males. That is, she can’t be sure they were males, because it was dark and they were wearing baseball caps, but they were walking along the towpath from the direction of the Burton house.’
‘She didn’t see them leaving the house,’ Sam checked.
‘Negative. They boarded a boat – maybe black-and-white – tied up in front of the Rosenblatt boat, started the motor and left. Nice and smooth, though one of them stumbled boarding and one of the others caught him.’ Cutter paused. ‘You want her to come in, Sam?’
‘Tell her we’ll come to her later, see if she remembers anything else.’
‘Pity it isn’t conclusive.’
‘At least we know there were four of them,’ Martinez said.
�
��If it was them,’ Cutter said.
‘It was,’ Sam said. ‘I’d bet the farm.’
At eleven – with initial computer trawls bringing up no unsolved cases anyplace with matching or similar modus operandi; violent hate crimes, too damned many; hogtied victims, mostly sex crimes; some homicides by carbon monoxide poisoning; any combination of the three, zero – and with details entered into ViCAP (the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), Sam had a call from Gia Russo.
‘I figured you’d want to talk to me, Detective.’
‘We’ll fit in with your needs,’ Sam told her. ‘How are the children doing?’
‘Mia’s unsettled, and Johnny still doesn’t know.’ Her strain was audible. ‘But just to say I’ll be available as soon as my husband’s locum shows up – he’s a doctor – so he can come home and help take care of them.’
‘That would be good,’ Sam said.
‘Though I can tell you right now that if you’re hoping I’m going to come up with someone who hated Pete or Mary Ann enough to do that’ – her voice choked – ‘you’re going to be disappointed.’
‘I’m sure, Mrs Russo, but the fact is you never know what you might be able to help with. It doesn’t have to be a question of personal hate. It can be a grudge going back a long way, or it can be work-related or even something going back a generation.’ He paused. ‘Or it could be nothing to do with Mr or Mrs Ventrino at all.’
‘You mean just because they were with their friends,’ Gia Russo said. ‘Oh, dear God.’
They went to the morgue, and learned that after identifying the bodies of his son and daughter-in-law, William Burton had collapsed and been taken to Jackson Memorial. Word was he wanted to talk to them, but Sam and Martinez knew that no doctor worth his salt would let them near him for a while.
The Reardon family, arrived from Chicago and Boston for the same awful purpose, were waiting in one of the family rooms, sharing the same pinched, hollow, shattered expressions, the father sitting shaking his head, the mother sitting straight, hands twisting in her lap, the brother pacing as they entered and introduced themselves.
‘Do you have news?’ Sean Reardon was as fair and blue-eyed as his sister.
‘Not yet, sir,’ Sam told him. ‘But I promise you we’re doing all we can.’
Fear and Loathing Page 4