“Must be that permanent Magic Marker,” Stone said.
“I spoke to the owner,” Nazario said. “They’re gonna paint over it after the lunch hour.”
Burch stared in dismay at the graffiti on the men’s room wall:
MIAMI POLICE SGT. CRAIG BURCH WEARS PANTYHOSE.
“I hear from Cookie, the cute waitress, the little one with the big butt, that the same thing’s on the wall in the ladies’ room,” Nazario said.
“I thought she’d mellowed out,” Burch said.
Horns blared as they hurtled across NW Twelfth Avenue, Nazario at the wheel. “Maybe somebody else did it. You arrest anybody who knows you eat there? Maybe somebody with a grudge just got outta jail.”
“Nah. Connie knows it’s my favorite place. That other cops go there. Trying to embarrass me. And I can recognize her printing. Dotting the i with that little heart is a dead giveaway. It’s gotta be her.”
“Shoulda sent her flowers or something. Sure your car is ready?”
“They said it was.”
Leon wiped his hands on a rag, shoved it in his back pocket, and squinted through his thick, grimy glasses. “Never had this before,” he said. “Come ’ere, I wanna show you something.”
“When a mechanic says that,” Nazario muttered, “it’s never good news.”
The Blazer sat in the dusty lot outside, the hood up.
Leon displayed the source of the problem.
“What the hell?” Burch said. “Is that what…”
“Oh, Jesus,” Nazario said.
“Somebody had to put it in the gas tank,” Leon said. “Dang thing expanded, eventually worked its way into the fuel line, plugged it up.” He regarded them solemnly, his pale eyes questioning. “Hell of a thing. Couldn’t have been an accident. Sorry the bill is so high, but this was a tough one.”
“Holy shit,” Burch said, as Leon disappeared with his credit card. “Do you really think that Connie…?”
“Face it, Sarge. Who else would drop a Tampax in your gas tank?”
Chapter Eighteen
The mountain of messages had grown prodigiously in the hour he’d been gone. A stack of new leads had come in from Crime Stoppers, and his phone rang incessantly. As he spoke to callers, Stone tried to organize. He set aside an alarming number of messages from other law enforcement agencies nationwide, all with unsolved murders they hoped to link to the same serial killer. He’d return those calls later. He eliminated tips from psychics and those from callers who named suspects too young to be linked to a series of murders that began twenty-five years ago.
“I’m sure it’s not your son-in-law,” he assured a fearful woman. “He’s only twenty-seven now.”
A tearful elderly woman whimpered that she was so relieved to hear his voice. A man had stared at her in the supermarket, she said. Former President Richard Nixon was the killer, swore a man with a shaky voice. His television set had told him so.
A man who insisted on remaining anonymous whispered that the murders were a CIA conspiracy designed to “thin out the herd. There are too many people in the world now. They’re starting to eliminate the sick and the weak.”
“The killer is living under the Sunny Isles Bridge disguised as a pirate,” a caller said.
“Thank you, Lieutenant Riley,” Stone muttered bitterly. His phone rang again.
“You’re the one who was on television. In the newspapers. You know nothing. It’s all a sham. For publicity. What can you know about him?” the caller asked persistently.
“More than he thinks,” Stone said, irritated.
“Such as?”
“I can’t divulge specifics at this point in the investigation,” he said, as Emma, the secretary, handed him another fistful of messages. “But we’re moving forward.”
“Tell me one thing…” the man persisted.
Stone felt almost relieved to see Padron arrive, to spirit him away for more prearranged interviews.
“Have to go now. There’s a new development. Thanks for calling.” He hung up.
The interviews were phoners with out-of-state media. Stone sat in Padron’s comfortably padded leather chair growing increasingly uncomfortable with each telephone encounter. He hated repeating himself over and over to each one. Every reporter he spoke to tried to elicit a promise that Stone would tip him or her off exclusively when he broke the case. As if his top priority, he thought disdainfully, would be to dial a total stranger in New Jersey or Ohio. He soon stopped remembering their names.
Stone thought about Burch’s warnings regarding the press. It reminded him of the time Gran took him to a petting zoo. He was nine years old, happily feeding the goats and llamas sacks of food pellets from a vending machine. Then his grandmother had no more quarters for the machine. The animals were friendly, cuddly and cute, until he ran out of food. Then they rushed him, pushy and demanding until he lost his balance and fell. A huge llama stepped on his foot, holding him in place as it ripped the empty food sack from his hands with huge yellow teeth. He screamed until his grandmother rescued him.
Padron was still feeding the llama. How long, Stone wondered, would it stay friendly?
The PIO officer bounced back into his office with word that Nell Hunter, a reporter for the morning paper, wanted to write a profile on Stone.
Stone remembered her from the press conference. A small, nicely built girl with blond hair and a friendly smile. She’d worn a peasant skirt and sandals and asked her questions in a chirpy little voice that reminded him of a cartoon character. He hadn’t heard any of the guys gripe about her. Burch was right about developing a relationship with a trusted reporter. Maybe she was the one. He’d liked that savvy female reporter who’d worked on the Ricky Chance case. Females are more sensitive to victims, he thought, and way more interesting to talk to. They also smell better.
Most male reporters, except for the slick TV guys who wore makeup, appeared nerdy and uninteresting. The one from the News sprayed saliva when he talked, had crumbs in his beard, and never let anybody finish an answer before blurting out another question.
He called Nell Hunter and set up an appointment.
As he left PIO, Detective Ron Diaz was putting together a brief press release on his case, the elderly widow’s brutal murder.
“Got ’em,” he told Stone with a grin. “Just booked the guy.”
“Good deal, who was it?”
“The handyman. Paroled six weeks ago on a sexual battery conviction. Did a day’s work for the victim last week. She was nice enough to fix him a sandwich for lunch. Well, no good deed goes unpunished. He asks to use the bathroom and while he’s in there, he steals her antique watch. She misses it after he leaves, calls and tells him that if he doesn’t bring it back, her next call is to the cops. It’s already pawned and he’s on parole. So he goes back there the other morning. Says he knocked but she didn’t answer the door. Musta been in the bathroom with the water running. He gets into the house and one thing leads to another. Patrol pulled him over. He was driving her car.”
“Nice work.”
“Thanks, but no rest for the weary. Just caught another one. Bar shooting in Little Havana. A crazy thing. Guy leans over a pool table to line up his shot and all the other players see his underwear. He’s wearing pink boxer shorts. Believe that? They all start hooting, cracking jokes, ragging on the guy. Insults fly. He goes out to the car for his gun and walks back in shooting. Kills one, wounds two. Who’da thought pink underwear ’ud get three people shot, one an innocent bystander.”
Stone had never been to the newspaper office before. When he stepped off the elevator she was waiting, big brown eyes and a smattering of freckles across her nose. He sat next to her desk while she asked him questions and typed his answers into a computer terminal.
He balked at certain personal questions. Yes, he was single. He listed the schools he’d attended, revealed that his grandmother had raised him. Nell laughed a lot. She seemed to take no offense when he said, “I’m not answering t
hat, it’s too personal,” as when she asked about his parents.
She listened to his war stories from patrol. He waxed enthusiastic about police work, cold cases, and how he had persistently applied until he landed a berth on the squad.
She pried for more details about the Meadows investigation but he refused to elaborate. When they took a break and went to the employee cafeteria for coffee and oatmeal cookies, she insisted on paying.
She was from Long Island, she said, had worked on two other newspapers, and had won an award while working in Akron, Ohio, for a series on abused women.
They took the elevator back to the newsroom. It wasn’t what he had expected. He had imagined it noisier, more crowded and convivial. Instead, each reporter labored alone in a little gray-walled cubicle with a telephone and a computer terminal. It was much like police headquarters, but unlike headquarters, this seemed to be a very boring place to work.
She had brightened her drab cubicle with photos, cartoons, and a pink paper flower in a plastic vase.
“Will your story be in tomorrow’s newspaper?” he asked.
She laughed heartily, as though he’d told a joke.
“No, silly.” Her shiny little white teeth flashed. “I have lots more work to do. Maybe it’ll run next weekend, or maybe not.” Feature writers, she explained, had more time to work on stories than reporters who cover breaking news.
They talked easily and she seemed enthusiastic when he hinted at possible collaboration in the future. What was it that Burch said? One hand washes the other. That’s when it occurred to him to ask the favor.
Maybe she could help out his team, he said. He explained that they were trying to identify a corpse in an old case. The man was a drinker, between thirty-five and forty-five years of age, and approximately six feet tall. He had been missing since 1992. There might have been something in the newspaper then. Was there a way to look it up?
“Sure,” she said lightly, and demonstrated.
The paper’s information retrieval system fascinated him. Type in a word or a phrase, pick a year, and the computer would instantly spit out a list of all the stories in which that word or phrase appeared.
“It only goes back as far as 1981, the year our library system—formerly known as the morgue—was computerized,” she said cheerfully. “For stories prior to that we have to pull the old files and search the hard clips by hand, but everything since then is in the system.”
She typed in “missing man,” then selected a year, 1992. The archives reported forty-seven stories. Stone noted the names of men who fit Terrell’s general description and had vanished during the right time period. Nell typed them into the system to see if they had been reported as found in later stories. Time-consuming, but faster and more all-encompassing than could be done through Miami police records. No wonder reporters often can get ahead of detectives, he thought.
The disappearance of the man whose identity they were seeking may not have been immediately reported, Stone told her. If he vanished after a move to Miami or arriving in South Florida on vacation, he might not have been missed for some time.
Stone would have liked to continue searching the system—in fact, his fingers itched to command the keyboard—but Nell insisted on continuing their interview, to the point of silliness, he thought.
What sports did he play in high school? Who was his prom date? His favorite foods? “You’re not going to put that in the story,” he objected.
“I won’t know until I write it,” she said. “Too much information is better than not enough.”
She walked him down to the lobby when he was leaving, and promised she’d continue the computer search for his missing man later.
“I have to tell you,” she said. “Your description is so vague it fits half the population. I mean, you didn’t even give me the hair or eye color. What about scars, birthmarks, tattoos, clothes, jewelry, or other identifying characteristics?”
“Sorry, that’s all we’ve got.”
“What you’re saying is that he’s just bones. He must be a skeleton you found.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Mr. Bones.” She winked mischievously. “Sure you don’t want to tell me everything?”
“Help me out on this,” he promised, “and you’ll be the first to know.” He meant it. He gave her his number.
Did she like him? he wondered. Was she this flirtatious with everybody?
He told Padron, who’d beeped him twice, that he was still tied up at the newspaper, then drove to Miami Beach. The big house across from the golf course on Chase Avenue was just the way he remembered it, a new generation of children playing in the yard.
“Samuel!” Mordechai Waldman greeted him from behind the cluttered desk in his study. “It is wonderful to see you. I’ve been reading about you in the newspapers! I knew you would grow up to be a force for good, just like your grandmother. How is she?”
“The same, but older.”
“Like all of us, if we are fortunate.” He was dressed in black, wore a beard and a yarmulke, the corners of his fringed undershirt showing beneath his dark vest.
“I need your help, Rabbi.”
“Whatever I can do, Samuel. Anything.”
He told the rabbi everything, there in that comfortable study where Waldman’s wife, Chani, served tea and cake.
The rabbi listened gravely. Dubious at first, he shook his head. Then he became thoughtful.
“When death comes, the eyes and mouth are traditionally closed by the firstborn son,” he said. “The body is washed with warm water and the hair and nails are trimmed. Then the loved one is covered with a clean white sheet or wrapped in a white linen shroud. The dead are never left alone. A shomer stays with the body, reading from the Psalms until burial. The mourners eat hard-boiled eggs and bread for the first meal afterward. I concede that these traditions bear some similarities to what you have observed, but America is known for its ritual murders and serial killers. That doesn’t mean—”
“But, Rabbi, in ritual murders investigators find behavior that is not necessary to commit the crime but gratifies the emotional needs of the killer. Isn’t it true that the emotional needs of many people are rooted in religion or perhaps in a deluded perversion of religion?”
The rabbi sighed, his gaze wandering to the children at play outside his study window. “The world today is such a dark place. Summer will be gone soon,” he said, as though thinking aloud. “Yom Kippur is coming. The Day of Atonement.”
“One thing I don’t get,” Stone said, “is the dirt. A small amount of soil, apparently a teaspoon or so, has been found beneath the victims’ heads. The scenes are otherwise immaculate. It has to be put there deliberately.”
The rabbi’s eyes flicked away from the children and back to his. “You’re sure of this?”
“It’s consistent at every scene, all nine.”
The rabbi leaned forward, speaking carefully.
“A small sack of soil from Israel may be placed under the head because when the messiah comes, those buried in Israel’s earth will be resurrected first.”
Stone felt an adrenaline rush.
“You may be right, Samuel. But you say that most of these poor women were not of the Jewish faith.” He paced his study, his narrow shoulders hunched. “Could it be someone of the faith, unbalanced, forever trying to atone for some prior sin?”
He turned to the detective. “Is this what you meant when you told the press that you knew more about him than he realizes?”
“I wasn’t sure, then. What do you think could take him to all of those cities? Is he a musician? A truck driver? What job? What profession?”
“Who can say? How does he travel? In comfort to a preplanned destination? Or is he a hobo, a lost soul who wanders the road and finds himself wherever he happens to be?”
“Hard to say whether he’s well financed or a nomadic wanderer, but my guess is that he has specific destinations because his pattern may be repeating. The first w
as in Paterson, New Jersey. So was the last. Miami was the second. And, Rabbi, I have a strong suspicion that he’s here. I can’t explain it, but I can feel it my bones.”
“Never discount your instincts, Samuel. If you are right he has probably heard your voice, seen your face. That leaves you at a disadvantage. You haven’t seen his. If he is unbalanced he may be quite agitated by what you said. Be well. Be careful.”
He walked Stone out to his car.
“Above all,” he said, “trust your instincts, Samuel. Trust your instincts.”
The detective watched him enter the house, pausing for a moment to touch the mezuzah on the door post before going inside.
Stone went back to the station, up the rear elevator to Homicide, but was still ambushed by Padron, eager to learn how his interview had gone.
Stone fielded some calls and listened to his voice mail. One caller left no name, just three words: “You know nothing.”
“You’re right,” he muttered. He played it again. Weren’t those the same words an earlier caller used? Was it the same voice? Only three words. It was hard to tell.
He spoke to several elderly ladies who had nothing to offer but were eager to chat.
A roiling sky exploded into a pounding rain as he drove home. Heavy rain depressed him. It always did. He opened the door to his darkened apartment. The red light on his message machine was flashing. The tape was full. Most were messages from old friends, neighbors, and schoolmates who had seen him on television or in the newspaper.
One was from Nell Hunter.
He stretched out wearily on his bed in the semidarkness and called her.
“A couple of possibilities on Mr. Bones,” she said in that chirpy way she talked.
“You still at the paper?” he asked. “You always work such long hours?”
“It keeps me out of trouble, off the street.” She laughed. “I don’t know many people in town yet.”
“You won’t meet them at the office,” he said.
“Au contraire,” she said softly. “I’ve met some pretty interesting people here. Like today.”
Cold Case Squad Page 15