You Only Die Twice

by Edna Buchanan

  Edna Buchanan

  You Only Die Twice

  A Novel

  FOR MICHAEL CONGDON

  It was déjà vu all over again.

  YOGI BERRA

  That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been.

  ECCLESIASTES 3:15

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1

  Hot sand sizzled beneath my feet. An endless turquoise sea…

  2

  “But that’s impossible!” I gasped. “She’d only been dead a…

  3

  A figure loomed, silhouetted in the doorway, as I swallowed…

  4

  I found the groundskeeper back at the cottage, pointing out…

  5

  Fortified by strong hot coffee, my brightest lipstick, and a…

  6

  Fuller G. Stockton peered around the massive mahogany door from…

  7

  It was nearly dark when I arrived at the Amsterdam,…

  8

  I walked two blocks to the boardwalk and the dark…

  9

  The engines roared like jungle animals as the plane shuddered,…

  10

  “What an emotional experience, walking out of prison with an…

  11

  “How novel. A great argument,” Jeremiah Tannen said. The former…

  12

  I drove away on streets as dark and shadowy as…

  13

  Martin Kagan appeared more successful than I expected. His shiny…

  14

  “Her name is Shannon Broussard, a Seattle woman reported missing…

  15

  I drank the liquid fire otherwise known as café Cubano…

  16

  I’d missed something, I thought, as I drove back to…

  17

  “Oh, my God!” I groped for the control panel, stabbing…

  18

  I was babbling nonstop about the baby, so Fitzgerald eventually…

  19

  I e-mailed the site administrator.

  20

  “What do you mean, suicide? That’s impossible.”

  21

  I laughed in amazement. “What on earth are you doing…

  22

  Numb and shivering, I sat with my spine pressed to…

  Acknowledgments

  Praise

  Other Books by Edna Buchanan

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Hot sand sizzled beneath my feet. An endless turquoise sea stretched into infinity. Bright sailboats darted beyond the breakers, their colors etched against a flawless blue sky. Playful ocean breezes kissed my face, lifted my hair off my shoulders, and ruffled my skirt around my knees. The day was perfect, a day to die for. Too bad about the corpse bobbing gently in the surf.

  She appeared serene, a drifting, dreaming mermaid, narrow-waisted and full-breasted, with long slim legs: an enchanting gift from the deep. She wore seaweed in her hair, which was long and honey-colored, streaked by brilliant light as it swirled like something alive just beneath the water’s glinting surface.

  Had she been caught by the rip current, that fast-moving jet of water that races back to the sea, or did she plunge from a cruise ship or a party boat? Perhaps she was a tourist who went wading, unaware of the sharp drop-off only a few feet from shore. But if so, why was she naked?

  Clearly she was no rafter drowned in a quest for freedom and a new life, or gold chains and designer jeans. Her fingertips and toenails gleamed with a pearly luster, as though polished to perfection by the tides. This woman appeared to have lived the good life. None of the grotesqueries that the sea and its creatures inflict on the dead had overtaken her yet. Obviously she had not been in the water long.

  I had overheard the initial radio transmission on the “floater” while working on a story at Miami Beach police headquarters. My ears had perked up. My name is Britt Montero, and I cover the police beat in this city where everything is exaggerated, where colors are too vivid to be real, where ugly is uglier, beautiful is breathtaking, and passions run high. Every day on this job, I see new faces. Many are dead. My mission is to chronicle their stories and preserve them permanently—on the pages of the newspaper of record, in our files, and on our consciousness, forever.

  My editors at the Miami News share a somewhat different view of my job description. As a result, I had been dutifully poring through tall gray stacks of computer printouts in the police public information unit. The art department planned a locator map for Sunday’s paper, to accompany my piece on the crime rate. My task was to compile the crime statistics zone by zone and identify the scene of every rape, murder, armed robbery, and aggravated assault.

  I hate projects based on numbers. If words are my strength, decimal points are my weakness. Calculating the number of violent crimes per hundred thousand population has always been problematic for me. Is it 32 crimes per 100,000, 320 or 3.2? A live story on a dead woman is infinitely more intriguing.

  Studying the body more closely, I could see that we shared characteristics in common. We were close in age and appearance. My plans, to bodysurf and sunbathe today along this same sandy stretch, had been ruined by the DBI (Dull But Important) project I had agreed to complete on my day off. Her plans had also been ruined. All of them. Permanently. Some quirk of fate had delivered us both to the coastal strip I had yearned for, sun on my shoulders, sea breeze in my hair—but it wasn’t the day at the beach either one of us had in mind.

  Along with a lifeguard, two uniformed cops, and a growing crowd, I watched a detective trudge toward us across the sand. Emery Rychek was an old-timer, one of the few holdouts who had not opted for guayaberas when Miami Beach police dress codes were relaxed. Unlit cigar clenched between his teeth, his white shirt open at the throat, his shapeless gabardine jacket flapping in the breeze, Rychek handled more than his share of deaths, most of them routine. Young cops want sexier calls, not grim reminders of their own mortality. Rychek never seemed to mind the unpleasant tasks that come with a corpse.

  “So, you beat me here, Britt,” he acknowledged, his voice a gravelly rumble.

  “I was at the station, working on a story about the crime rate. I heard it go out.”

  Rychek chewed his cigar. His smelly stogies often came in handy, to mask the stench of corpses gone undiscovered too long, though colleagues routinely debated which odor was more nauseating. No need for him to light up here. This corpse was as fresh as the sea air.

  “Well, lookit what washed up.” He appraised her for a moment, fierce eyebrows raised in mock surprise, then turned to the cops. “Whattaya waiting for, the tide to go out and take her with it?”

  “Thought maybe we should leave her like she was till you guys took a look,” one said.

  Rychek shook his head in disgust as the two cops stripped off their shoes and socks, rolled up their pant legs, pulled on rubber gloves, and waded gingerly into the sun-dappled shallows. Green water streamed from her hair as they dragged her ashore. Her pale half-open eyes stared hopefully at the sky, her expression reverent. Her only adornment was a gold earring, the delicate outline of a tiny open heart.

  Excellent, I thought. Distinctive jewelry is a good start for those of us trying to identify the dead. But this woman’s youth and beauty guaranteed she’d be no lost soul. I dreaded the cries of her loved ones, sure to appear momentarily, frantic with grief, hearts breaking.

  “A great body is a terrible thing to waste,” one of the cops muttered.

  Rychek ignored him, as he straddled the naked woman, cigar still clenched between his teeth. He grunted as he tugged her pale form one way, then the other, seeking wounds or identifying marks.
I watched, painfully aware that there is no modesty, no privacy in death.

  “Hey, Red.” Rychek glanced over my shoulder.

  Lottie Dane was elbowing her way through the growing throng of gawkers. She is the best news shooter in town and my best friend. Her red hair whipped wildly in the wind as she strode across the sand in blue jeans and hand-tooled cowboy boots, her twin Canon EOS cameras, a wide-angle lens on one and a telephoto on the other, slung from leather straps around her neck.

  “Hell-all-Friday, who is she?” Lottie murmured, shutter clicking. “Sure don’t look like the usual coffin fodder that washes up on this beach. Where’s her clothes? How’d she git here?”

  “Gimme a chance,” Rychek protested. “I just got here myself.”

  The big eyes of a small boy were fixed on the dead woman’s breasts. Runty and pale, wearing baggy swim trunks a size too large, he gaped from the forward fringe of the crowd. Where is his mother? I wondered, as a beach patrolman brought the detective a yellow plastic sheet from his Jeep.

  “What do you think?” I asked Rychek, as he peeled off his rubber gloves.

  “No bullet holes or stab wounds,” he said. “We’ll know more when we get a name on her. Most likely it’s an accidental drowning.”

  “Is the M.E. coming out?”

  He shook his head. “The wagon’s on the way.” Medical examiners don’t normally attend drownings these days, except in cases of mass casualties, obvious foul play, or refugee smugglers who routinely drop their human cargo offshore—sometimes way too far offshore.

  “My Raymond saw her first!” The boy’s proud mother had finally made an appearance. She wore big sunglasses, pink hair curlers under a floppy sun hat, and a bikini that exposed a ruddy hysterectomy scar on her glistening belly. She smelled strongly of coconut-scented suntan oil and spoke with a New York accent.

  Raymond, pail and shovel forgotten, still stared, transfixed, at the sheet-covered corpse.

  “Unbelievable,” his mother told all who would listen. “Raymond kept trying to tell me, but I didn’t pay attention. That kid is always into something.” She shook her head smugly. “I shoulda known.

  “He kept saying, ‘Mommy, Mommy! There’s a lady with no clothes on!’

  “I was in a daze,” she acknowledged, “working on my tan, half asleep. Thought it must be another one of them damn foreign models, you know, stripping topless on the beach. Most got nothing to show anyhow. The ones with the pierced nipples and belly buttons are the worst.” She snorted in disgust.

  I crouched down to Raymond’s level. It was tough to compete with the naked lady. “Raymond? Raymond? My name is…” He tore his eyes off the corpse and stared at me, perplexed.

  “Does she have wings now?” he asked, in a small high voice. “Can she fly? Like on TV?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I hope so.”

  His mother had used the cell phone in her beach bag to dial 911. But according to Rychek she had not been the first to notify police. The initial call had come from a regular, he said, in a sixteenth-floor apartment at the Casa Milagro, a high-rise condominium behind us. The resident had scanned the horizon with high-powered binoculars and spotted the body riding the incoming tide.

  Rychek’s handheld police radio crackled. The detective listened to the message, squinted toward the upper floors of the graceful tower with its turquoise-blue trim and wraparound balconies, and turned back toward the water.

  “Anybody see anything?”

  Scores of eyes scanned the sea’s sparkling surface.

  “I do!” somebody shouted. Murmurs swept the crowd. A flurry of excitement: Something was floating beyond the breakers, a hundred yards down the beach. One man broke into a run, sprinting across the sand, pursued by several others who splashed into the waves in a race for the prize.

  “Take it easy. Don’t kill each other over it!” Rychek shouted after them.

  A young Spanish-speaking man with a killer tan and drop-dead pecs waded out of the surf triumphantly waving the trophy above his head like a banner: a rose-red bikini bathing-suit top.

  The detective dangled it by its thin strap, holding it up for me to scrutinize.

  “Whattaya think, Britt. Her size?”

  “Looks about right. Only one way to tell if a bathing suit fits.”

  “We’ll try it on Cinderella at the M.E. office. No sign of the bottom half. Some pervert probably took it home as a souvenir,” he said. “Musta thought it was his lucky day.”

  Lottie left for a feature assignment at the Garden Center. I knew I should leave too. Instead, I walked the sand as far north as 34th Street, looking for an unattended beach towel or lounge chair the dead woman might have left, along with her personal belongings. No luck. That didn’t mean they hadn’t been there. A thief may have found them first.

  Rychek was talking to a buff jogger in his late seventies when I returned to the scene. A local who’d been around for years, the man did push-ups and headstands in the sand each day, then ran and swam miles along the beach, rain or shine. I occasionally encountered him in the supermarket, in the produce department. He was slightly hard of hearing and spoke loudly, with an eastern European accent.

  “I saw her.” He nodded, gesturing broadly. “This morning. She vas svimming, right there.” He jabbed a gnarly index finger at a deep-blue spot in the water.

  “She looked like a good svimmer. It vas early, vhen it looked like rain, before the sky cleared up. There vas almost nobody on the beach.”

  “She was alone?” Rychek asked.

  The man paused. “There vas another svimmer. A man. I thought he vas vid her, but”—he shrugged—

  “maybe not.”

  He had not seen her arrive or leave and could describe neither the other swimmer nor the color of her bathing suit.

  “I vasn’t paying attention,” he said. “I vas exercising. I guess the guy vasn’t vid her….”

  “Why do you say that?” Rychek asked.

  “Vell, if he vas vid her”—he shrugged and opened his hairy, muscular arms—“vhere is he now?”

  “Good question,” Rychek said.

  “You think they both got in trouble and there’s another body out there?” I asked. Women have a higher fat–muscle ratio than men, whose leaner bodies are less buoyant. If both had drowned, she would probably surface first.

  We stared at the sea, valleys and troughs, rising and falling like the ebb and flow of life, with all its pain and joy.

  “Terrible.” The old man shook his head. “A terrible thing. She vas young, so attractive.”

  He was right. Sun, sea, and sky usually lift my spirits. Instead, a wave of sadness washed over me. My feet sank in the coarse sand, irritating my toes as I trudged back to my car, illegally parked at a bus stop, my press card prominently displayed on the dash. The blinding sun made my head throb, and I suddenly felt thirsty and dehydrated.

  I sat in my superheated T-Bird, wondering if her car was parked nearby. If so, the meter must have run out by now. Expired. Like its driver.

  The woman’s image shimmered in the heat waves that rose from the street as I drove back to the Miami News building. Did she wake up this morning, I wondered, with a premonition, a bad dream, any clue that this day would be her last? How many hearts would break, how many lives change because hers had ended early?

  Bobby Tubbs was in the slot at the city desk. His round face wore its perpetual scowl of annoyance. “Did you get the stax for the art department? They need them right away.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ve also got a story for tomorrow. A drowning on the beach, an unidentified woman.”

  “Keep it short,” he snapped.

  I double-checked the figures, turned in the crime statistics, and reread my notes on the dead woman.

  Rip currents might be to blame, I thought. Sometimes they seize scores of swimmers, setting off mass rescues, as TV news choppers swarm the skies. I’d experienced them myself. When the sand beneath your feet seems to be movi
ng rapidly toward shore, it is actually you who are moving fast—out to sea. Swimmers panic, tire, and drown. By swimming parallel to the coastline, one can escape the narrow band of savage current. Or simply relax and let Mother Nature sweep you away. Enjoy her wild ride. Eventually, out beyond the breakers, she’ll set you free to swim back to shore.

  I made some calls. The beach patrol reported no rescues, no other casualties, no rip currents. So my lead depended on who she was. I was sure she would be identified by deadline. I was wrong. A medical examiner’s investigator returned my call at 6 P.M. She was still Jane Doe, not scheduled for autopsy until morning. I called Rychek.

  “Nuttin’,” he reported grimly. “Do me a favor, wouldja, kid? Put her description in the newspaper.”

  “That’s why I called.”

  “Good girl, a woman after my own heart.” I could hear him flipping the pages of his notebook and imagined him adjusting the gold-rimmed reading glasses he kept in his shirt pocket.

  “Lessee. You saw ’er yourself: probably early thirties. Nice figure, good-looking, five feet four-and-a-half, weight one twenty-one. Hair blondish, a little longer than shoulder length; you seen it. Eyes blue, bikini tan line. Nice manicure, good dental work. We’ll know more after the post.”

  “And the earring,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, we shot pictures,” he said. “Can you put one in the paper if we don’t have her ID’d by tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But if you ID her tonight, before our final at one A.M., call me so we can change the lead.”

  “You’ll be home?”

  “If I’m not, leave word. I’ll check my messages.”

  “So, how is your love life, kid? Hope you dumped the cop. You’re too good for ’im.”