The media, alerted by an exchange of urgent calls on police radios, were assembled in force outside the main gate of Bay Point, where they were being restricted from entering by security guards, also acting on Detective Jacobo’s orders. Reporters were already debating how the murderer or murderers had penetrated Bay Point’s security system and entered the Ernst house.
Brewmaster, on arrival, had been stopped briefly by three television reporters, holding microphones to the open window of his car while TV cameras shot closeups. The shouted questions overlapped. “Detective, are there any suspects yet?” … “Is it true the Ernsts have been murdered in the same way as others?” … “Has their daughter, Major Ernst, been informed?” … “Is she on her way back to Miami?” But Brewmaster had shaken his head and continued driving, stopping outside the Ernst house to instruct a uniform officer, “Call PIO and tell them we need someone here to deal with the press.”
In some police jurisdictions the murder of a prominent official or celebrity was categorized as a “red ball” homicide or, less officially, a “holy shit” case. Once given that label, the case received priority attention. In Miami, supposedly, no such category existed and all murders and murderers were deemed “equal under the law.” But the slaying of City Commissioner Ernst and his wife was already proving this untrue.
Part of the proof was the immediate arrival of Chief of Police Farrell W. Ketledge Jr., in an official car, driven by his sergeant aide. The chief was in uniform, his four stars of rank clearly displayed—the equivalent of a full general in the United States Army. As Detective Wightman observed quietly to one of the uniform men, “In any given year you can count the number of times the chief shows up at a homicide on the fingers of one hand.”
Lieutenant Newbold, who had arrived a few minutes earlier, met the chief at the main doorway to the house, with Brewmaster beside him.
The chief ordered crisply, “Show me the scene, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir. This way.”
With Newbold leading, the trio climbed a broad stairway, then walked along a landing to a bedroom, the doorway open. Inside they paused as the chief looked around.
The ID technicians were already at work. Dr. Sanchez was standing to one side, waiting for a photographer to finish. Detective Jacobo and Sylvia Walden were discussing possible fingerprint sites.
“Who found the bodies?” the chief asked. “How much do we know?”
Newbold signaled to Brewmaster, who described the maid’s arrival, her morning tea duty, and her screams, all of which he had learned about from the majordomo, Theo Palacio. Palacio had explained that he and his wife were away from late afternoon the day before until early that morning—which happened every week when they visited Maria Palacio’s invalid sister in West Palm Beach. The maid, too, had left the house at 5:00 P.M. the day before.
“We don’t know the time of death yet,” Newbold added, “but it seems pretty likely it happened when Mr. and Mrs. Ernst were in the house alone.”
Brewmaster told the chief, “Of course, sir, we’ll double-check the Palacios’ whereabouts.”
The chief nodded. “So we could be looking for someone who knew the house routines.”
The conclusion was so obvious that neither Newbold nor Brewmaster made a comment. As both knew, Chief Ketledge had never been a detective and had risen to his high rank through police administration, at which he excelled. Occasionally, though, like everyone else in law enforcement, the chief savored a taste of the detective process.
The chief moved farther into the room to get a better view. He walked beside, then behind, the recumbent bodies on which the ID crew was working. Then, as he was about to move again, the voice of Dion Jacobo rang out.
“Stop! Don’t go there!”
The chief wheeled, incredulity and anger in his eyes. In an icy voice he demanded, “And who—”
Without waiting, Jacobo answered smartly, “Sir! Detective Jacobo, Chief. I’m co–lead investigator here.”
The two men faced each other. Both were black. Their eyes met squarely.
Jacobo volunteered, “Sorry to shout, sir, but it was urgent.”
The chief was still glaring, clearly weighing his next move.
Technically, the peremptory order Jacobo had given was appropriate and correct. As co–lead investigator he had authority over everyone else at the scene, irrespective of rank. But it was an authority seldom pushed to its limits, especially when the officer being spoken to was seven ranks higher than the detective.
As the others watched, Jacobo swallowed. He knew that, correct or not, he had probably gone too far, and by this time tomorrow he could be back in uniform on a midnight walking beat in downtown Miami.
It was then that Julio Verona coughed discreetly and addressed the chief. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I think the detective was just trying to preserve what’s here.” He pointed to an area behind both bodies.
Lieutenant Newbold asked, “What is it?”
“A dead rabbit,” Verona said, looking down. “It may be significant.”
Brewmaster looked up, startled. “Damn right, it’s significant! It’s another symbol. We need Malcolm Ainslie.”
The chief asked Verona skeptically, “You’re suggesting that Detective Jacobo knew the animal was there?”
“I don’t know, sir,” the ID supervisor said mildly. “But until we’ve searched the area we have to assume there’s evidence everywhere.”
The chief hesitated, plainly exercising control. He had a reputation as a rigid disciplinarian, but also for being fair.
“Very well.” More composed, he regarded everyone at the crime scene. “I came here to make it clear how important this case is. Right now a lot of eyes are watching us. Work hard. We need a solution soon.”
Moving back to the doorway, Chief Ketledge paused before Newbold. “Lieutenant, see to it that a commendation is recorded in Detective Jacobo’s file.” The chief smiled slightly. “Let’s say, ‘for tenaciously preserving evidence in difficult circumstances.’”
A moment later the chief was gone.
About an hour afterward, as evidence was still being collected, Julio Verona reported to Sergeant Brewmaster. “There’s a wallet among Mr. Ernst’s effects with his driver’s license and credit cards. No money, but the shape of the wallet looks like there usually was some.”
Brewmaster promptly checked with Theo Palacio, who, with his wife, had been instructed to remain in the kitchen and not disturb anything in the house. The majordomo was close to tears and had trouble speaking. His wife, seated at the kitchen table, had clearly been crying too. “Mr. Ernst always had money in that wallet,” Theo said. “Mostly big bills, fifties and hundreds. He liked having cash.”
“Do you know if he recorded the numbers of those big bills?”
Palacio shook his head. “I doubt it.”
After pausing to let Palacio compose himself, Brewmaster continued, “Let me ask something else.” He flipped through several pages of his notebook, referring to notes made earlier. “You told me that when you came into the Ernsts’ bedroom this morning, you realized there was nothing you could do to help Mr. and Mrs. Ernst, and you went immediately to a phone.”
“That’s the way it was, sir. I called nine-one-one.”
“But did you touch anything in the bedroom? Anything at all?”
Palacio shook his head. “I knew that until the police got here, everything had to stay the same.” The majordomo hesitated.
Brewmaster prompted, “What is it?”
“Well, there was one thing I’d forgotten until now. The radio was playing very loudly. I turned it off. I’m sorry if I—”
“Never mind. But let’s go look at it.”
In the Ernst bedroom, the two men walked toward a portable radio. Brewmaster asked, “When you turned this off, did you change the station?”
“No, sir.”
“Has anyone used the radio since?”
“I don’t think so.”
Brewmaster slipped a rubber glove over his right hand, then turned the radio on. The song, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! filled the room. The detective peered at the radio’s dial, set to 93.1 FM.
“That’s WTMI,” Palacio said. “It was a favorite of Mrs. Ernst. She often listened to it.”
Soon afterward, Brewmaster took Maria Palacio to the murdered couple’s bedroom to ask another question. “I advise you not to look at the bodies,” he told her. “I’ll stand between them and you. But there’s something else I want you to see.”
The “something else” was jewelry—a sapphire and diamond ring with matching earrings, another gold ring, a pearl necklace with a pink tourmaline clasp, a gold bracelet set with diamonds—all of it obviously valuable and left in plain view on a bedroom dressing table.
“Yes, that’s Mrs. Ernst’s,” Maria Palacio said. “At night she never bothered to put it away, just left it out, then put it in the safe the next morning. I warned her once …” The woman’s voice broke.
“That’s all, Mrs. Palacio, thank you,” Brewmaster said. “You’ve told me what I needed to know.”
Still later, replying to another Brewmaster question, Dr. Sanchez affirmed, “Yes, essentially the facial and head beatings and body mutilations of Mr. and Mrs. Ernst are similar to those in the Frost and Urbina cases—and probably, from reports I’ve received, in the Fort Lauderdale and Clearwater cases too.”
“And the knife wounds, Doctor?”
“I won’t be sure, of course, until after autopsy. But superficially I’d say the knife wounds on both bodies are from the same kind of bowie knife used on the others.”
As to the dead rabbit, Dr. Sanchez asked the owner of a pet store, Heather Ubens, with whom she had worked before, to come to the Ernst house. Ubens, an authority on small animals, identified the creature by its commercial name, a Lopear rabbit. Many of them, she said, were sold locally as pets. Since there was no sign of injury to the rabbit, in Ubens’s opinion it had been killed by asphyxiation—simply deprived of air.
After the rabbit had been photographed, Dr. Sanchez had it sent to the medical examiner’s office to be preserved in formaldehyde.
Sergeant Brewmaster checked with Theo Palacio to see if the rabbit had been a pet at the Ernst house. “Absolutely not. Mr. and Mrs. Ernst didn’t like animals,” the majordomo told him, adding, “I wanted them to have a guard dog because of all the crime; I even offered to take care of it myself. But Mr. Ernst said no, with him being a city commissioner, the police would always look out for his safety. But they didn’t, did they?”
Brewmaster chose not to answer.
Subsequently police made inquiries at other Miami pet stores, using crime-scene photos in an attempt to find the rabbit’s purchaser. But since so many rabbits were sold, sometimes in litters of seven or eight, and since few stores kept detailed records, the search proved fruitless.
Hank Brewmaster told Malcolm Ainslie about the dead rabbit and asked, “Is there something in Revelation that fits—the way those other things did?”
“There’s no rabbit in Revelation, or in any other part of the Bible; I’m sure of that,” Ainslie said. “It could still be a symbol, though. Rabbits as a species are very old.”
“Any religious connotation at all?”
“I’m not sure.” Ainslie paused, recalling a lecture series—Life Origins and Geologic Time—that he had attended soon after his religious faith began to wane. Details came back; he sometimes surprised himself by how much his memory retained. “Rabbits are Lagomorpha—that’s rabbits, hares, and pikas. They originated in North Asia near the end of the Paleocene.” He smiled. “Which is fifty-five million years before the Genesis version of creation.”
“You think our guy—an obsessed religious freak, you called him—knows all that?” Brewmaster asked.
“I doubt it. But who knows what he thinks, or why?”
That night at home Ainslie went to Karen’s personal computer, on which he kept a King James version of the Bible. The next day he told Brewmaster, “I did a computer search for any Bible reference to ‘lagomorph,’ ‘hare,’ or ‘pika.’ No lagomorphs or pikas, but ‘hare’ appears twice—once in Leviticus, once in Deuteronomy, though not at all in Revelation.”
“Do you think our rabbit could have been intended as a hare, and that way be a Bible symbol?”
“No, I don’t.” Ainslie hesitated, then said, “I’ll tell you what I do think, after a lot of thought last night. I don’t believe that rabbit is a Revelation symbol at all. It doesn’t fit. I reckon it’s a fake.”
As Brewmaster looked at him curiously, he went on, “All those other symbols left at murder scenes fitted something specific. Like the four dead cats—‘four beasts’—and the red moon—‘the moon became as blood’—and the trumpet—‘a great voice, as of a trumpet.’”
“I remember.” Brewmaster nodded.
“Oh, sure, a rabbit could be a ‘beast’—Revelation’s full of beasts.” Ainslie shook his head. “Somehow I don’t think so.”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“I guess it’s mostly instinct, Hank. But I think we need to keep an open mind about whether the Ernst murders were really another serial killing, or whether someone else did them and tried to make them look that way.”
“Aren’t you forgetting? We withheld those earlier crime-scene details.”
“But some were published. Reporters have sources; always happens.”
“Well, all that’s startling, Malcolm, and I’ll try to keep it in mind. But I have to tell you, after seeing that Ernst scene, I reckon your thoughts are way out.”
They left it there.
Soon afterward, Sandra Sanchez announced her findings following the autopsies of both victims. Yes, they had been killed by a bowie knife, as her first inspection of the wounds suggested. However, the distinctive notches and serrations in the bodies differed from those at the other killings, so a different knife was used—which proved nothing, because bowie knives could be purchased readily and a serial killer might easily own several.
Thus, as days went by, and despite Malcolm Ainslie’s doubts, it seemed increasingly certain that the Ernst killings had been committed by the same hand as the eight preceding unsolved murders. The basic circumstances were identical, and so were the supplementals: the dead rabbit, still possibly a Revelation symbol; removal of all money; the highly visible jewelry left untouched; and the loud-playing radio. Also, as with the earlier murders, there was no fingerprint evidence.
The investigators were troubled, however, by the speed with which the Ernst killings had followed the Urbina/Pine Terrace Condo murders only three days earlier. The previous killings had been spaced two to three months apart. The media and public were curious about that fact, and asked pertinent questions: Had the killer speeded up his deadly mission, whatever it might be? Did he have a sense of invincibility, of being “on a roll”? Was there special significance in a Miami city commissioner being a victim? Were other commissioners or officials in danger? And what were the police doing, if anything, to anticipate the killer’s next moves?
While the last question could not be answered publicly, the special task force surveillance of six suspects had begun, with Sergeant Ainslie in charge.
The Ernst murders, too, were quickly assigned as a task force responsibility. Sergeant Brewmaster, while continuing to lead the Ernst investigation, became a task force member, reporting to Malcolm Ainslie, as did the detectives from Brewmaster’s team—Dion Jacobo and Seth Wightman.
But even before all task force duties were fully in effect, a meeting took place that Ainslie knew was inevitable.
7
At 8:15 A.M., two days after the mutilated bodies of Gustav and Eleanor Ernst were discovered, Malcolm Ainslie arrived at Homicide headquarters, having already met Sergeant Brewmaster at the murder scene for an update. Disappointingly, nothing more had emerged since the day before. A canvass of the neighborh
ood, during which residents were asked about recent strangers in the Bay Point area, had produced, as Brewmaster said, “Nada.”
In Homicide, Lieutenant Newbold was waiting alongside Ainslie’s desk. He pointed and said, “Someone’s waiting for you in my office, Malcolm. You’d better hustle!”
Moments later, as Ainslie stood in the Homicide commander’s office doorway, he saw Cynthia Ernst, seated in Newbold’s chair.
She was dressed smartly in police uniform and looked stunning. How ironic, Ainslie thought, that severely cut masculine clothes could become so sexy on the body of a woman. The tailored, square-shouldered jacket bearing her gold oak leaves of major’s rank only emphasized the perfect proportions of her figure. Dark brown hair, trimmed to the regulation inch and a half above the collar line, framed her pale, creamy skin and penetrating green eyes. Ainslie caught the scent of a familiar perfume and was suddenly overwhelmed by memories.
Behind the desk, Cynthia had been perusing a single sheet of paper and now glanced up, her face expressionless.
“Come in,” she said. “Close the door.”
Ainslie did so, noticing that her eyes were red, presumably from crying.
Standing before the desk he began, “I’d like to say how truly sorry I am—”
“Thank you,” Major Ernst said quickly, then continued, in a businesslike manner, “I’m here because I have some questions for you, Sergeant.”
He matched her tone. “I’ll try to answer them.”
Even now, despite her coolness toward him, the sight and sound of Cynthia Ernst excited him, as it had so often when they were lovers. That erotic, arousing, provocative interlude now seemed long ago.
Their affair had begun five years earlier, while they were both Homicide detectives. Cynthia had been beautiful and desirable then, at thirty-three—three years younger than Malcolm. Now, he decided, she was even more alluring. Also, in a strange way, her unyielding coldness since their breakup, a year after the affair began, made her seem even more tempting and exciting than before. Cynthia transmitted her sexuality like a beacon—always had—and to Ainslie’s embarrassment he felt, even in this unromantic setting, an erection stirring.
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