Dangerous Ends

by Alex Segura

  He followed Harras inside and a chill slid over him. The house felt still and quiet, the air dense, dank and mildewed, like they’d just entered a long-sealed mausoleum. There was no furniture inside. Aside from a few boxes near the far wall of what must have been the living room, the entire house seemed abandoned.

  “Nobody home?” Pete said.

  “It’s been a hard sell,” Harras said as he looked around. “There were a few tenants here who lasted a while. But no one’s stuck around for more than a year or two.”

  “Why do you have the keys to this house?”

  “This case,” Harras said, pacing around the living room, “has, ah, bugged me for a while.”

  “How so?”

  “It just doesn’t add up,” Harras said, turning toward the southern wall.

  “But it’s not an FBI case,” Pete said.

  “That’s true,” Harras said.

  “So, you’re not supposed to be working it, retired or not,” Pete said.

  “Also true,” Harras said. “But now I am, so it all evens out.”

  “Funny how these things happen,” Pete said, a touch of bite in his words.

  “This is where the couch was,” Harras said, ignoring Pete’s jab. “Varela said he was sleeping here when the two male intruders broke into the house—average height, armed, and wearing black masks.” He motioned to the door, as if signaling for them to come in. He then turned toward Pete. “He didn’t wake up immediately—he said he heard a noise from the bedroom—his wife screaming out, ‘Why? Why are you doing this to me? Gaspar!’ That’s when he got up.”

  “Why was he sleeping on the couch?”

  Harras pointed at Pete and nodded. “Excellent question,” he said. “But a question we’ve never gotten a good answer to—at least not from Varela. He claims he dozed off while reading a novel on the couch, and that his wife went to bed early. Plausible. But his reading glasses were in the bedroom, and the book was on his nightstand, also in the bedroom.”

  “Could he have forgotten?”

  “You ever slept on the couch when you lived with a woman?” Harras asked.

  “Once or twice,” Pete said.

  “I’m sure you’d remember why, right? So, while Carmen is screaming in the bedroom, and, according to this version, being stabbed to death, one of the intruders approaches the now-awake Varela and—” as he spoke, Harras turned his body around to face where the couch had been over a decade before “—swung something at him.”

  “Something?” Pete said.

  “Varela’s story varies,” Harras said, moving closer to Pete. His face was flushed. “In his first comments to the police the night of the murder, he claimed it was a club. Later, it became a bat. Now, it could have been a large stick.

  “Varela tried to get up—remember he’d just been hit in the back of the head,” Harras said, stepping toward the hall, continuing his reenactment. “But before he could get very far, he said someone else—hard to see in the dark, but clearly a man and clearly strong—came down this hall and struck him down, hitting him across the face.”

  “With one blow?” Pete asked.

  “A few, at least,” Harras said. “He knocked him out. Or Varela said he did. By the time he woke up, the house was empty—some time had passed.”

  Harras walked a few paces away from the south wall and toward the door. He pointed to his feet.

  “This is where Varela claims he saw Janette Ledesma—or someone who looked a lot like her—when the person walked in and turned on a light,” Harras said. “She was wearing a bright orange dress. Varela claims he tried to get up after regaining consciousness. Ledesma, according to Varela, came in through the open door and ran to him. She looked over the scene, panicked, and ran out the way she came in without more than a frightened yelp. A few moments later, Vigil sees her outside of the Varela home. That was the only confirmed sighting. Other cops who were there first—like Graydon Smith—didn’t see anything.”

  “I’d imagine it was dark,” Pete said. “Since all this went down in the early morning.”

  “Probably,” Harras said, not sounding convinced. “This area wasn’t as developed then as it is today. But if I were to sleep here tonight and turn off all the lights, I’d be able to see pretty well.”

  “You have slept here, haven’t you?”

  Harras gave Pete a smile before he continued.

  “After Ledesma ran off, Varela was able to get up and wander to his bedroom,” Harras said, his words slowing down, like a car trying to avoid a dark shape in the street, unclear on what it was. “Where he found his murdered wife.

  “She’d suffered multiple stab wounds,” Harras said. “And by multiple, I don’t mean one or two. I mean thirty or forty. She was covered in blood. Long slashes all over her chest and back. She put up a fight. It was not a clean kill.”

  Pete walked toward the room but stopped short of going inside. He let his eyes wander into the empty space and tried to imagine how the bedroom had looked a decade ago. What pictures did they have on their nightstands? What art hung on their walls?

  “You don’t buy his story,” Pete said, almost as much to Harras as himself.

  “I believe parts of it,” Harras said. “I think there’s a lot going on. I also think there might be things that even Varela doesn’t know. But I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen the way they explained it at the trial. Still, the crazed gang idea smells funny to me. But gang murders aren’t a new twist in Miami. Look at Los Enfermos.”

  Harras was referring to one of the deadliest street gangs in Miami. A cabal of bloodthirsty knife-wielding killers, pro-Castro assassins, and drug dealers who had found a way to plague the city—to varying degrees of success—for years.

  “What about them?” Pete said.

  “I’m just saying that, conveniently, his story is vague enough that it can be pinned on anyone,” Harras said. “And I know parts of it are pure bullshit. That’s what bothers me.”

  “What parts do you believe?” Pete asked. Harras seemed somehow older, having aged years in the past few minutes they’d spent in the empty, musty house.

  Harras reached the front door and turned to Pete before walking out.

  “Let’s save that talk for when the three of us get together,” he said. “Got time for another stop?”

  PETE HOPPED into Harras’s car for the second trip, which took longer than he’d expected. They didn’t talk much on the way. Harras blasted some Miles—Bitches Brew. By the time they got on Le Jeune Road and crossed the 836 Expressway, Pete had an idea of where they were heading. Once the Moorish architecture started to crop up, he knew for sure. Opa-Locka.

  They turned on Ali Baba and Pete was struck more by the state of disrepair the neighborhood was in than by the style of architecture. The streets were decorated with abandoned cars and piles of garbage. Kids no older than fifteen stood sentry on every other intersection, corner boys already dipping their toes into a life of crime because they didn’t see any other option.

  Harras parked in front of a pale green house on Burlington Street, off Ali Baba. The house, like many of the others on the block, seemed abandoned. The paint looked worn and faded. Harras didn’t move to get out of the car. He turned the volume down on the stereo and acknowledged Pete sitting next to him.

  “This is where Janette Ledesma died.”

  Pete watched as a group of kids scurried past the house, tossing a ball back and forth as they ran.

  “She was beaten severely by her boyfriend, a guy named Gilbert Fermin,” Harras continued. “But that didn’t kill her. At least not right away. Instead of going to the hospital, Ledesma came back here to her house and got high. Couldn’t help herself, I guess. She fell down at some point—she’d gotten up from the couch, probably to get a glass of water. She fell and slammed her head against the dining room table. No one found her until a week later. This was four or five years ago.”

  “Jesus.”

  “At least that’s what the police report
says.”

  “What do you think happened?” Pete asked.

  Harras grimaced as he looked out of his car’s windshield. Pete guessed that the deaths weighed on him. Not just the ones they were looking into now, like Carmen Varela and Janette Ledesma, but in general. He’d seen too many crime scenes and too much blood.

  Harras kept his eyes on the windshield.

  Pete waited, expecting him to say more. But nothing came. The car had started to get hot—the air conditioning was off and the afternoon sun was burning through the vehicle. He swept a hand over his face.

  “What do you think happened in there?” Pete repeated the question.

  Harras closed his eyes for a second and let out an almost silent sigh. Pete wondered if the older man was straining for some kind of peace. A kind of serenity that had eluded both of them for years.

  Pete felt like he could finally see him for what he was—a veteran agent who’d been retired before he felt ready, stretching to keep the rush coming, like an aging ballplayer desperate for one more chance to get on the field. An ex-agent looking to get a few more notches in his belt before things went fully dark.

  “I think there’s a third party here—there’s someone who maybe isn’t Varela, who isn’t us, who doesn’t want this resolved the right way,” Harras continued. “Janette Ledesma was a druggie, an informant, and a liar. She was also a mother, had a job, and was someone’s daughter. She was the wild card in this whole scenario, and I would put all my pension on the fact that someone wanted her off the board.”

  “Even with the case closed?”

  “Nothing’s ever fully closed,” Harras said. “As long as there was room for a retrial, for any kind of revisiting of the case, she was in play.”

  Harras was quiet as the sounds of the neighborhood seeped into the car. Car horns, thumping hip-hop blaring from a house down the block.

  Harras pulled the car out and started to move down the street. He didn’t say anything else on the way back.

  THE SUN was fading as Pete drove down Bird Road, heading home. He replayed Harras’s description of the crime in his head. The older detective had spent a lot of time thinking about the case and had clearly looked through more evidence than Pete or Kathy had. They’d be able to catch up as soon as they could get their hands on the defense case file, the trial transcripts, and copies of all of Varela’s appeals. Pete made a note to talk to Kathy about it. He’d texted her after he and Harras parted but hadn’t gotten a response. Before anything else, Kathy, Harras, and he needed to spend some serious time together, laying ground rules for the investigation.

  He turned north and after about twenty minutes in middling traffic, drove into the Villa Verde Apartments parking lot. The buildings that made up the complex were painted in a garish green and yellow, but aside from the color scheme, Pete liked his place. He rented a modest two-bedroom that housed his secondhand furniture, concert T-shirts, books, and records. He parked his car in his assigned space and walked up the three flights to his apartment. He made a beeline for the air conditioner controls on the wall near the entrance, turning down the temperature.

  Pete yanked off his shirt and tossed it on the floor of his bedroom, missing the growing pile of dirty laundry. He closed the curtains to the sole window in the room and let himself plop on the bed. He was tired. The excursion with Harras had taken something out of him. Harras intimidated him, and with the detective working the case, Pete felt superfluous. He didn’t like that.

  Pete closed his eyes and thought of Maya. He was attracted to her. There was something about her, beyond the physical—something simmering beneath the pleasant exterior. A drive and persistence that Pete found appealing. She’d spent the majority of her adult life trying to exonerate her father, even though the courts and public opinion had already convicted him. She’d probably learned enough about Florida criminal law to become an attorney herself—and for what? Her father was still wasting away in prison, few believed him, and his options were dwindling. Pete wasn’t sure he’d be able to do the same if he were in her shoes. He had to look into Maya’s background. He filed the thought away for now. He still had a lot of catching up to do on the case first. A murder this old and with such history and publicity would require hours, maybe days, of research before they could conduct their first interview with confidence.

  After a few minutes, he opened his eyes, yawned, and stood up. Pete changed from worn jeans and a short-sleeved button-down into shorts and a faded blue Springsteen T-shirt. It was getting late, but his appetite was nowhere to be found. He was restless, though. He needed to do something.

  Pete walked into the living room and turned on the record player. He rifled through the box of albums under the tiny shelf where the console rested. He wanted something he didn’t have to think about. Something he could let the needle hit and not worry about skipping tracks or the backstory of each song. Pete thought too much—about music, books, his life. After years of clouding his brain with alcohol, he was still getting used to the clarity and constant brain activity sobriety provided. He liked it—most of the time.

  He pulled out the faded, off-white album sleeve. The cover to Neil Young’s Comes A Time looked almost like a picture that had fallen out of one of his grandfather’s old photo albums from Cuba—yellowed, sometimes gray snapshots of an earlier time. Pete pulled the vinyl out and placed it on the player. He dropped the needle with care and turned the volume up a smidge. He rarely played his music too loud. The opening, lazy strum of the title track came through the record player’s not-so-great speakers, followed by Young’s nasal, childlike vocals. The album reminded Pete of driving around the frigid north of New Jersey in the wee hours, leaving a sports arena after a long game, and rushing home to finish filing a story or feature, a dozen beers sloshing around in his head, the car stereo cranked up to the max, his windows down, and the wind hitting his face to keep him awake. He remembered the sadness he’d feel—turning the car off with a few tracks left to go—and then the creaking steps to their apartment, his halfhearted attempts to be quiet, and Emily’s sigh as she rolled over in bed, annoyed at being woken up but not eager to get into an argument.

  He should have known then that it was over. Before his father died and they had to uproot themselves and come back to Miami. Before he’d settled for a job as a copy editor at the Miami Times—a gig he had hated and tried to ignore as much as he could. Before he found himself trying to solve a missing persons case just because he was bored and lost, and had given up on having a life that meant anything.

  His phone chimed on the kitchen counter.

  Pete walked over and scanned the display. It was Jack.

  “Hello,” Pete said.

  Jack had been sober for over a decade. For the last year or so, Jack had helped Pete navigate the challenges that come with quitting drinking, the ways to repair the damage he’d caused in the past, and how to handle himself in the present—and how to avoid the pitfalls that could lead to another drink and a deep dive into darkness Pete was not sure he’d survive.

  Pete went to AA meetings. Jack was his sponsor, though they’d never had a formal conversation about it. They chatted regularly and went to meetings together. Pete found the simple tasks that helped keep the meetings going—the “service”—also helped him stay grounded and sober. By stacking chairs, making coffee, or talking to other alcoholics like him, Pete was able to focus on something selfless for a few minutes. It helped disentangle his life, which had been anything but simple in the years before he stumbled into his first meeting. It had been a life on the verge—of being broke, heartbroken, destroyed—like a boulder careening down the side of a steep mountain, with little hope of stopping. The anxiety, only dulled by drink, paralyzed him daily, leaving him in a state so frantic even the most trivial situations sent him into a panic. On most days, Pete was lucky if he could get himself out of bed and to work.

  “Petey boy, how goes it?”

  “Not bad,” Pete said as he walked over to the
record player and turned the volume down. “Working on a new case.”

  “Yeah? Good one?” Jack was a bit older than Pete. He reminded Pete of the youthful uncle he never had as a kid.

  “Seems like it,” Pete said. He pulled out a chair from his rickety dining set and sat down. “It’s still early. Kathy hooked me up with it.”

  “Good, good,” Jack said. “You gotta keep busy. You hitting the seven thirty on Miller?”

  Pete hesitated. As much as he loved the program, his brain still hated the activity of it. Sometimes going to meetings felt like a chore, but, deep inside, he knew he needed it. Especially today, when he found himself tired and confused, his brain on overdrive. That was when his kind were most susceptible.

  “Wasn’t planning on it,” Pete said. “Not gonna lie.”

  “That’s a shame,” Jack said. He wasn’t the pushy type. But Pete knew when he didn’t approve. “I’m heading over in a bit, if you want a lift.”

  Pete slid a finger over the dusty table and looked around his empty apartment. Over the past year, he’d made it his own—decorated, filled it with his things. But it was still just a space, and he was alone, with not enough to do.

  “Yeah, I’ll go,” Pete said. “Meet you outside.”

  JACK’S CAR reeked of cigarettes and air freshener. Even with the window down, the patchouli odor stung Pete’s nostrils. The car—a beat-up copper-colored Volkswagen Golf that seemed to be a century old—creaked down Bird Road toward Pete’s apartment. It was almost nine in the evening.

  “That was a good one,” Pete said, trying to strike up a conversation. Jack had been quiet on the way to the meeting and most of the way back.

  “It’s always good,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road. His voice sounded distant. “Better than when we were drinking, right?”

  “Right,” Pete said.

  Jack pulled into Pete’s complex and left the engine running. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. Pete waited. Sometimes it took Jack a little bit to get to what he wanted to say.