Cold Case Squad

by Edna Buchanan

  “She was always hard to work for,” Stone said. “And that temper doesn’t help.”

  “She’s hurting.”

  “Not our fault. Why does that shit always run downhill in our direction? I like her better locked in her office nursing her hangover.”

  “I don’t remember her drinking before it happened.”

  “Right. What we need is a shrink and a support group for her and that Terrell woman.” Stone flashed his badge at lobby security.

  Arson investigator Jack Olson’s tenth-floor office overlooked the slick, silver ribbon that snaked below. The Miami River is a working waterway, alive with pleasure boaters, foreign freighters, illicit cargos and smuggled immigrants. Beneath its surface lie sunken secrets and the constant cross currents of international intrigue.

  Olson drew a blank on the name, but seeing the file sparked a memory rush.

  “Oh, yeah.” His bushy eyebrows lifted and he licked his lips. “I remember that one. Was out there that day. Nice neighborhood. Relatively young guy, tinkering with his Thunderbird. The primo, ’fifty-seven hardtop, you know, with the portholes. Super V-8, double acting shocks, Fordomatic drive. Classic. Love a set of those wheels myself. Though nobody ’ud recognize it by the time we saw it. What a waste. But I digress.”

  He scanned the original report. “Here we go. Yeah. Couple hours before it happens, the victim borrows a line wrench from his neighbor across the street. Repairing a faulty fuel line, he says. Those T-babies are prone to that. Flakes of rust off the gas tank clogging the fuel lines. My brother-in-law restored one of ’em. Paid ten g’s for it, spends a couple years on the project, and sells it for fifty.”

  He thumbed through supplements to the final report. “Here’s how we figure it goes down. He’s under the car using a portable trouble light when Bingo! The car slips off the jack and pins ’im to the garage floor. Bad news. Worse, when the car drops on ’im, the jack stand punctures the gas tank. Poor bastard’s hurting, busted ribs. Probably conscious, but even if he sucks up enough breath to yell, nobody’s home to hear ’im.

  “He’s trapped, and leaking gasoline is splashing onto the hot bulb of his work light. Poof! Damn thing ignites. Instant inferno. He’s ground zero. The fuel feeds the flames until the tank explodes. Fatal freaking accident.”

  Olson nodded in recollection.

  “We were lucky to save the house. Hadda jack up the car to free ’im—what was left of ’im. Here, see for yourself.”

  He spilled the eight-by-ten scene photos out of a manila envelope onto his desk.

  Nazario winced.

  “Damn.” Stone picked one up.

  In the gutted garage, beneath the car’s blackened shell, were the charred remains of a man, his fists clenched in a pugilistic position. Devoid of flesh, muscle, and tendons, the exposed leg bones resembled broomsticks. His jaws were wide open as though frozen in a silent, agonal scream.

  “His own mother wouldn’t have recognized ’im,” Olsen said. “What’s up? What’s your interest in this one now?”

  “Somebody thinks it was no accident,” Nazario said.

  “After all these years?” The arson investigator looked skeptical. His voice rose in indignation. “How come they didn’t speak up sooner?”

  Stone ignored the question. “Anything strike you as suspicious at the time?”

  Olson raked his fingers through bristly salt-and-pepper hair, then shook his head. “Looked cut and dried to me. One a your guys was out there. Didn’t spot no red flags. Homicide detective, medical examiner, a fire inspector, and me—we all came to the same conclusion.

  “You’re welcome to a copy a the report.” He shuffled papers. “Next of kin, the wife, said he’s in the garage working on his car when she leaves to go shopping and run errands. She’s gone a couple a hours. We’re already on the scene when she gets back. A real babe, beautiful girl, shook up big time. Had an infant in the car.”

  “Who called it in?” Stone asked.

  Olson’s thick index finger roamed down the fact sheet. “Dispatch history shows a flurry a nine-one-one calls right after the garage door blows off. Whole neighborhood musta called in. But looks like we listed the reporting persons as the neighbors across the street. The Walkers, 424 Mariposa Lane. Hadda kid’s birthday party in progress. Yard fulla rugrats saw the whole thing.

  “Nobody seen leaving the garage. No strangers, no getaway cars. Accidental. This kinda thing’ud be pretty damn hard to rig.” The arson investigator shrugged. “You can’t believe all the crazy ways people manage to accidentally off themselves.

  “Then again, you probably can. You guys see it all the time. Rescue Seven caught a doozy yesterday. Guy wants his Hungry Man TV dinner. His microwave oven won’t work. He tries to fix it and gets zapped. Missed his last meal—it was the one with the roast beef, potatoes, and gravy. Poor guy died hungry.”

  “Lookit that.” Nazario pointed to the river below and a rusting freighter limping toward open sea while they waited for Olson to copy the file. The top deck was stacked with hundreds and hundreds of bicycles.

  “So that’s where they all go. Been a rash of bicycle thefts in my neighborhood, off front porches, outta garages, driveways, backyards. Thieves snipping the locks of bikes chained outside the gym and the shopping center.”

  “They’re headed for Haiti now,” Stone said.

  “Told you,” Nazario said in the car. “This Terrell caper ain’t gonna take us a whole lot of time.”

  “From your lips to God’s ears.” Stone swung into the parking lot at their next stop.

  The imposing three-building complex straddled three acres. With its raspberry-colored furniture, potted palms, and smiling receptionist, strangers might mistake the softly lit lobby for that of a resort hotel—unless they read the mission statement above the front desk at One Bob Hope Road.

  “To provide accurate, timely, dignified, compassionate and professional death investigative services for the citizens of Miami–Dade County…”

  Every year more than three thousand people arrive there too late to read the words. They’re unable to appreciate the photos and paintings of scenic Florida. Dead eyes can’t see the images of golden dawns, blood-red sunsets, and turquoise blue water displayed throughout a building that neither looks nor smells like a morgue. Electronic air scrubbers erase the odors of formaldehyde and decomposing bodies, a concept borrowed from airports that never smell like jet fuel.

  A bronze cannon guards the entrance. The ancient weapon salvaged from the Santa Margarita, a Spanish galleon sunk with all aboard by a killer hurricane off the Florida coast nearly four hundred years ago.

  “He had broken ribs where the car was resting on him.” The chief medical examiner had pulled Terrell’s file for the detectives. “No evidence of other trauma, no drugs or alcohol in his system.”

  The chief didn’t sign off on the case himself. He’d been out of the country at the time, keynote speaker at a conference in Zurich. A deputy medical examiner, Dr. Vernon Duffy, handled the autopsy.

  “The victim had a lethal level of carbon monoxide in his blood, evidence of smoke inhalation, consistent with death by fire.”

  The chief squinted at handwritten notations. “Hmmm, interesting. Normally, identification would have been made through dental records. It wasn’t in this case.”

  “How’s that?” Stone asked.

  “This fellow had no dental X-rays. Apparently he had perfect teeth, no caries. No reason for X-rays if you never have any restorations.” He continued through the report. “The jaw was badly burned. The upper front teeth were flaked apart due to the heat.”

  Stone read over his shoulder. “The doctor noted that the victim had an unusually fatty liver. Isn’t that a sign of chronic alcoholism?”

  The chief nodded. “A prime candidate for cirrhosis, had he lived long enough.”

  “So how did they positively identify him?” Nazario asked.

  The chief medical examiner readjusted his reading glasses. “It
appears that the victim had lost his right ring finger in his youth. In a water-skiing accident, it says here. The fellow who died in the fire was missing the same finger. In addition, the victim was last seen by his wife, working on his car, alone in the garage. He was also seen there by a neighbor and the regular letter carrier, who knew him by sight. The deceased was wearing the victim’s wedding ring.”

  Stone snorted. “So much for Charles Terrell, precise and careful, skilled and competent. Isn’t that what the first wife said? Proof again that love is blind. The guy was really a hard drinker who lost a finger and blew up his car. Man was an accident waiting to happen. Must have been a thrill a minute having him around.”

  “DNA wasn’t in extensive use then.” The medical examiner pondered the pages and frowned. “Today I would have run it. As a precautionary measure, just to be sure.”

  “Come on, Doc, don’t give us heart attacks here.” Nazario shifted uneasily in his seat.

  “You’re not saying you doubt his identity, are you?” Stone asked.

  The medical examiner shook his head and closed the file. “But one can’t be too careful. In a case out west a few years ago, the crew of a passing freight train reported seeing a burning car on top of a hill. The police found a charred body, presumably the owner, in the still-blazing vehicle. But an hour later a seriously burned man showed up at the local emergency room. He gave the doctors a cock-and-bull story about how he was injured. Investigators soon learned that he owned the car, was deeply in debt, and had taken out a big life insurance policy. Pathologists decided to take another look at the burned body found in the car and noticed gas bubbles indicating that at the time of the fire, the body had already begun to decompose.

  “The car’s owner had picked up a bum somewhere and locked him in the trunk, where the man suffocated. The next day he drove the car to the hilltop and propped the dead man behind the wheel. He doused the corpse and the driver’s seat with gasoline. His plan was to ignite it, then roll it down the hill to crash into the passing train. It would look like a spectacular, fiery accident.

  “But as he sat in the passenger seat waiting for the train, he absent-mindedly lit a cigarette. The gasoline fumes ignited and the car burst into flames. By the time the train arrived, he’d fled, badly burned.”

  “Mighta worked if he hadn’t been a smoker,” Stone said.

  The chief nodded. “Had he not shown up at the hospital seeking treatment for his burns, no one might have looked more closely at the microscopic slides from the charred corpse.”

  “Why didn’t they see it the first time?” Stone said.

  “Because,” the chief said, “too often, our observations are based on what we expect to see due to our training and experience. Expectations modify our observations. In other words, we see what we preconceive. The indications that the body was beginning to change due to decomposition were there. Initially they saw them, but failed to observe them. They observed the fire instead.”

  “We see what we preconceive,” Stone echoed.

  Uncharacteristically quiet en route back to headquarters, Stone didn’t even protest when Burch told them it would take more to satisfy K. C. Riley and April Terrell.

  “You don’t have to be a shrink to figure this one out,” Burch said.

  “Right.” Nazario shuffled through messages on the receptionist’s desk. “Hey, Sarge, you got a stack over here. Call your wife.”

  “Toss ’em in the round file,” Burch said casually.

  “You sure? You got one at one-thirty, another one at one thirty-seven, another one at one forty-two…could be important. Here’s one at two-thirty. The—”

  “I get the picture,” Burch said coldly. “My voice mail is full, too.”

  “—last one at four-twenty.”

  “Look, I already talked to Connie three times today,” Burch said, “but there ain’t no talking to her. She’s really pissed. I think it’s hormones. She just wants to bust my chops. And I’m no glutton for punishment.”

  “Ain’t love grand?” Stone said.

  “God bless America,” Nazario said.

  “Look,” Burch said. “It ain’t like she wants me back between the sheets or to join her for tea. All she wants to know is where I’m staying, so she can come over and cut up what’s left of my raggedy clothes.”

  He sighed. “I’m calling it a day. You pick up and it’s her, don’t let it slip where I’m staying. I’m lucky to find the place I got and I don’t need her coming over to trash it.”

  He left, but reemerged from the elevator fifteen minutes later. Nazario was on the phone. Stone glanced up from his computer keyboard. “What, you checking up on us, Sarge? Thought you left.”

  “So did I. Could one of you guys gimme a lift?”

  “Sure, Sarge.” Nazario hung up. “Where’s your car at?”

  “Who knows?” He sank wearily into his desk chair, his expression resigned.

  Stone whipped his chair around and lowered his voice. “Repossessed?”

  “Nah, the Chevy’s paid for.”

  “Somebody steal your Blazer?” Nazario said, voice rising. “Outta the police garage?”

  Emma, the middle-age secretary at her desk outside Riley’s office, glanced up curiously.

  “Keep it down, would ya?” Burch muttered.

  “You report it?” Stone asked.

  “Nah. I know who copped it.”

  “Not Connie,” Nazario said. “She wouldn’t steal your wheels.”

  “Hadda be. This is guerrilla warfare and Connie is the guerrilla queen. And don’t say it,” he warned them. “I’ve tried talking sense to her. Won’t listen. Turned the kids against me, too. Wouldn’t be surprised if my oldest wasn’t the wheel man. Jennifer, the sixteen-year-old drama queen, just got her license. My big mistake was teaching that kid to drive. Connie didn’t have the patience.”

  “What does she want?” Stone said.

  “Me, miserable. So far she’s doing a helluva job. I saw Maureen Hartley again when we solved her daughter’s case and Connie blew it all outta proportion. Wish to hell I was having the party times she thinks I am.”

  “Let’s go look for it, Sarge,” Nazario offered. “We’re detectives, ain’t we? We can find your wheels. You always tell us to think dirty, like the perp. Who knows this suspect better? Think dirty. Where you think she’d park it?”

  “In her state of mind? The bottom of the bay.”

  “You in, Stone?”

  “Sure,” the tall black detective said, as he keyed his radio to somebody trying to raise him.

  “Hey, Stone.” It was unit 236, Homicide Detective Ron Diaz. “You wanted a heads-up on elderly women murdered in their bedrooms? We just caught one, over in Morningside. I’m headed there now.”

  “She live alone? Any sign of forced entry?”

  “Keep your shirt on, I ain’t even there yet.”

  “What’s the address?” Stone waved off Burch and Nazario, who left without him.

  “That I can tell you. Two seventy-two Northeast Sixty-third Street.”

  “Meet you there.”

  Stone often wished he had investigated the Meadows murder from jump. Would this be his chance, at last, to follow the killer’s fresh tracks, instead of hunting a shadow from a twenty-four-year distance?

  He had pursued the case of Virginia Meadows with initial optimism, intent on finding the man who killed the seventy-seven-year-old widow. What he found, instead, were nine identical murder cases in cities across America.

  Meadows was no isolated killing, as he first believed. In Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Memphis, Cleveland, and Paterson, New Jersey, there had been other lonely elderly women. Like Virginia Meadows, they lived alone. Like her, they were strangled and tucked into bed. All looked strangely peaceful in death, as though sleeping. How many others, he wondered, had been wrongly classified as natural causes?

  The killer was still active. Stone had found the most recent case in Paterson, seventeen months ago. Af
ter linking the cases, he had been temporarily assigned to an FBI task force formed to find the serial killer. But the task force became an early casualty of the war on terrorism. One by one the federal agents were pulled off the pursuit for assignments involving national security.

  Only Sam Stone was left.

  As he drove, he noted the time, the weather conditions, and the traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, in the neighborhood. The scene, a typical South Florida home, one-story CBS construction, painted white, with green shutters. The wooden front door in the center of the house was also painted green. It stood open.

  Two patrol cars and a detective unit were parked out front. The crime scene van was arriving, just turning the corner.

  The front yard, bordered by a hibiscus hedge, was slightly overgrown. A uniform was stringing yellow crime scene tape between two palm trees.

  A heavyset woman in a housecoat, her hair in big pink curlers, stood in a side yard with a patrolman. One hand covered her eyes.

  Make the scene talk to you, Stone thought, as he always did, then stepped into the house.

  The living room was unremarkable, a comfortable couch on the east wall, a television set on the west wall. To the north, through the living room, was the dining room. There he turned left, following the voices to the bedroom.

  Diaz was pulling on a pair of latex gloves. “So, whattaya think, Stone, she one of yours?”

  The room was a bloodbath.

  The frail victim lay supine on a queen-size bed, a halo of blood around her head. She wore only a nightgown, which had been pulled up around her neck. Blood had spattered across the headboard and the wall. Her wrists and hands were covered with congealed blood, probably from defense wounds she had suffered. A bed sheet was wrapped around her left leg. There appeared to be bite marks on her buttocks and right shoulder.

  A trail of blood led from the bed to the bathroom. Streaks and spatters were on the walls, sink, and medicine cabinet and bloody shoe prints tracked the white tile floor. The tub was half full of water.

  “Musta happened this morning,” Diaz said.