The callers, she said tearfully, needed their jobs.
I went back to Rychek. “Emery, I think you can disregard the international calls. It’s a mistake.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It did seem amazing, being dead and all, how our victim managed to call south so often.”
In a stunning transformation, hailed by Fitzgerald as a “true miracle from God,” the sisters were now able to speak relatively understandable English and offered an intriguing detail. When sent to strip the room, they had found shreds of plastic, fabric, and tiny bits of paper on the floor around the toilet, apparently the detritus left by someone who stood over it, to cut up and flush away the evidence of her very existence. The debris, the housekeepers insisted, sucked into a vacuum cleaner, long since emptied, had been too shredded to identify or piece together. Had the killer erased her identity along with his own?
“Probably all her ID, driver’s license, credit cards, maybe even a checkbook,” Rychek said morosely. “You’re absolutely sure?” he barked at the sisters, who cringed and insisted, big eyes terrified.
The local calls, apparently Kaithlin’s, included half a dozen to the same Miami number. Rychek punched it into the desktop speakerphone.
“You have reached the law offices of Martin Kagan Junior. Office hours are nine A.M. to five P.M. Monday through Friday. If you have an emergency, leave your number after the beep and your call will be returned.”
“Bingo!” Rychek sang out. “Not gonna leave no message. I gotta see this guy in person.” He chewed with gusto on his stogie. “What was a classy broad like her doing with a two-bit slimebag like him?”
“I think his father used to do a lot of pro-bono appeals for death row inmates,” I said. “He specialized in death-penalty cases, got a lot of press.”
“But the old man ain’t been around in years and his kid’s a loser. Didn’t even know he had an office. He must be coming up in the world. I thought he worked out of a phone booth at the jail.”
Kaithlin’s possessions were repacked and the boxes labeled and removed, bound this time for a police evidence locker.
“You look beat, kid,” Rychek said. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”
“What about you?” I said. “Are you going to see Kagan?”
“Not tonight. I got other fish to fry.”
“Like what?”
“She always has to know everything, huh?” Fitzgerald said.
“Always. I’d swear she never sleeps. You, kid,” Rychek demanded, “you stay away from Kagan. Don’t you tip ’im off till I get a shot at ’im. Hear me?”
“When will that be?” I said reluctantly.
“Probably not until Monday late, even Tuesday. I gotta get all my shit together to fly up to Daytona to spring R. J. Jordan. Whadda joke. Who’da thought I’d ever be up there getting some asshole off death row.”
Fitzgerald caught up with me as I left the lobby.
“Where you headed?” I said.
“Emery’s going back to the station. I’m gonna catch a cab to my hotel.”
“Where you staying?”
“Shoulda got a place on the Beach. Instead, I’m over at the Sterling, near the medical examiner’s office.”
It was out of my way, across the bay, but it doesn’t hurt to do a source a favor. Besides, I liked him.
“Come on, I’ll drive you,” I offered.
“No, no, you live here on the Beach, right?”
“No sweat,” I insisted. “It’ll just take a few minutes. You’ll wind up going by way of Connecticut if you get a cabbie who makes you as an out-of-towner.”
“So,” I said, as we merged into Collins Avenue traffic, “have you always worked for the state attorney’s office?”
He hadn’t. After the Gulf War, he’d served as a military policeman. Later he joined the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, rose from road patrol to detective, and worked in robbery, narcotics, and child abuse units until he became one of the elite, a homicide detective. He’d been on loan to the prosecutor’s office for the past year.
“How come?” I asked.
He shrugged, staring out at passing traffic and throngs of scantily clad pedestrians. “Long story. Short version is a bad case of burnout. Thought I could use some R and R.”
“So they sent you to Miami,” I said. He obviously didn’t want to talk about why he left homicide. “When they couldn’t find her body,” I asked, “why didn’t anybody suspect that Kaithlin Jordan might be alive?”
“Nobody doubted she was dead at the time,” he said, “not even her mother, and you know how mothers are; they always refuse to believe the worst.”
“You’re right,” I said. “They always say…” I put my hand over my heart as he joined me in reciting that all-too-familiar refrain: “If my child was dead, I’d know it.”
“Exactly,” he said. “In this case it didn’t seem unusual not to find her. So many possibilities existed. R. J. grew up hunting, fishing, and camping all over the state. Where do you start, with more than six hundred thousand acres of Florida’s state forests, all within range of his plane? There was also a good chance he’d left her in a swamp or dumped her at sea. Dropped in the Gulf Stream, she’d never be found. Do me a favor, would you?” he said. “Stop at that minimart up ahead, so I can pick up a paper and some cigarettes?”
I slowed down, then recognized the minimart. “Don’t buy the paper now,” I said. “Wait for the final, for my story.”
“I’ll get some magazines then, to tide me over. I still need the smokes.”
Reluctantly, I parked in front.
“Want to come in?”
“I’ll wait here,” I said.
I saw Fitzgerald through the store’s plate-glass window. The place, recently reopened by new owners, looked clean and well run. Uneasy, I watched other customers come and go and leaned over to unlock the glove compartment. I keep my gun inside.
He came back with several magazines, a crossword puzzle book, cigarettes, gum, a bottle of aspirin, and what looked like a pint of whiskey in a paper bag. I unlocked the car door.
He spotted the key dangling from the glove box. “This neighborhood make you nervous?” he said.
“Oh, I come here all the time,” I said casually.
His gaze was knowing and curious.
“I’ve been here before,” I acknowledged. I nodded at the storefront. “Used to be a ma-and-pa grocery. ’Bout a year ago, just before Christmas, a teenage gang burst in, a nasty bunch. They’d done a rash of other robberies. At nearly every one they killed a security guard or an owner and took his gun. They were well armed when they got here. They jumped up on the counters, laughing, yelling, shooting, having so much fun they forgot to take the money.
“They killed the owner, wounded his wife and a customer, and kept shooting the butcher in the back. I saw him dead on the floor in the bloody sawdust behind the counter. He still wore his white apron. He had eleven children.”
“Yeah. Some sights you don’t forget.” Fitzgerald gave a great heavy sigh. “Did they get them?”
“Oh, yeah.” I sighed, too, and pulled out into traffic.
“Juveniles?”
“Yeah.”
We did not speak again until I pulled up onto the ramp at his hotel a few blocks away. About to say something, he didn’t. He hesitated instead, pushed my hair back from my face, gently touched my cheek, and ran his thumb along my jaw line.
“’Night. Thanks for the ride.” He got out of my car.
We hadn’t said much, but in that moment I was sorry he was gone.
Numb with exhaustion, I drove home, walked Bitsy around the block, and tumbled into bed. In my dreams, Kaithlin Jordan sat on her terrace watching a shadowy sea. Her hair streamed in the wind, or was it the tide?
I awoke in the dark before dawn. My head ached and the inside of my mouth felt fuzzy. I rummaged numbly for my jogging shorts and a T-shirt, then staggered into the bathroom, reached for my toothbrush, and stared.
If detectives were to scrutinize my personal possessions, trying to re-create the final hours of my life, what would they make of this? Bristles littered the sink. My new toothbrush was shedding.
8
I walked two blocks to the boardwalk and the dark sea, then ran. Fine droplets of dew or sea spray evolved into a chilly drizzle that cooled my feverish face and throbbing eyes. The beach stretched as gray, wide, and vacant as a dead woman’s eyes. The boardwalk was deserted except for an occasional diehard jogger. Most regulars were still asleep or taking the day off. A vague feeling of dread stiffened my spine as Casa Milagro loomed ahead.
Was Zachary Marsh awake? Watching me now? When did he sleep?
Eyes could always be watching, from any or all of the thousands of windows that face the beach. But that wasn’t what was so disturbing. It was the watcher himself.
Never again could I swim, sunbathe, or melt, totally relaxed, into the warm sand within range of the high-powered lenses he wielded like weapons. How unfair.
Thoughts of Marsh made me uneasy. And then there was the murdered mermaid. Would I ever gaze at the sea again without thinking of Kaithlin?
No one else knows the landmarks that confront me daily in this steamy and mercurial city. On deadline, energy high, racing to a shooting, I experience a sudden rush of recognition, like the sight of a modest green house on a corner, flower beds in bloom. There were no flowers the day I saw them carry out the bodies: a woman, two small children, and their little dog. The husband intended a murder-suicide, he said, but failed. He blamed his hands. They shook too much to reload and use the gun on himself. He will be free some day; they will still be dead.
Buildings, businesses, even expressway ramps, all strewn with corpses from the past. Life is a battlefield, yet the more casualties I witness, the more committed I am to this place that I love. What is a city but its people? Who else is there to remember them, write about them, and keep track of the dead? Otherwise they would be truly gone forever.
But I had owned my secret retreat. This beach, and the solace of its limitless horizon, was mine. Now it too had been violated, my final sanctuary haunted by a murdered woman and spied upon from above.
I limped home, wet, cold, and nursing a sore hamstring, stopping only at the corner drugstore for a new toothbrush. The Sunday paper waited like a gift on my doorstep. It’s like Christmas morning for a reporter to open the newspaper and see his or her big story. First, unfortunately, you have to unwrap it.
Bloated by scores of sections all tightly squeezed into a snug plastic bag, the weekend paper was a blunt object. Hurled onto a suburban lawn, it was a deadly missile, heavy enough to kill a small animal or knock a human being senseless.
Where the hell was the news? When did the newspaper become all things to all people? Even free samples of shampoo and hair conditioner were tucked inside. Sunday was once the best showcase for a great news story. Now readers are lucky if they can locate the news among all the sections devoted to boats, cars, coupons, comics, child rearing, music, entertainment, sports, food, gardening, home and design, tropical living, glossy magazines, the television guide, pop psychology, opinion, gossip, advice, classified ads, neighborhood sections, and real estate.
I impatiently flung sections into a bin earmarked for Billy Boots’s sandbox. Reporters are constantly disheartened by editors who insist that we have no space, that the news hole is small and our stories must be kept brief, tight, and cut to the bone. That’s what television news does. Print is supposedly superior, since we can dig into background and deliver information in depth. But apparently that only applies if the topic is how to prune a poinsettia, evaluate an antique, or remodel a home.
I finally found the A-section, the story of the “woman who died twice” and the resulting death row drama stripped across the front. It was accompanied by the backgrounder I had put together, including profiles of the players and a chronological account of the case. Lottie’s press conference and cemetery photos completed the layout, along with head shots of R. J. and Kaithlin.
Another photo made the jump page inside: Kaithlin’s covered corpse on the beach, the ubiquitous Raymond clutching his tiny shovel.
Suddenly shivering, I drank hot coffee, stripped off my wet clothes, took a hot shower, and dressed. Sweater weather had arrived with the rain, and even lower temperatures were predicted in the first real cold snap of the season.
I dug out my blue cashmere pullover and a pair of lightweight wool slacks and hit the office early. I love an empty newsroom.
Determined readers had somehow managed to locate the news section. My voice-mail box was already full. The phone rang nonstop. My most faithful callers, the lunatic fringe, offered theories. One frequent caller declared that Kaithlin was obviously in the witness protection plan and was probably still alive, relocated yet again. Another insisted that her corpse undergo painstaking examination for space alien implants. A tearful caller, once an unwed teenage mother, claimed her life had been turned around by Kaithlin’s mentoring program.
“She was an inspiration,” she said, “an angel.”
“She was a conniving bitch!” railed a male caller, who claimed to be an old hunting buddy of R. J.’s. “She tried to have her husband murdered by the state! That man’s the salt of the earth,” he added. “Real people.”
As I scrolled through old stories on Martin Kagan, I was interrupted by a high-pitched squeal, as though somebody had stepped on a puppy dog’s tail.
“Britt! What are you doing here?” Angel flung both arms around me as though we were long-lost sisters.
“I work here,” I mumbled.
“I mean this early! The kids are so excited!” She pushed her long blond hair out of her eyes. “I was so thrilled when Rooney said you’d be in the wedding!”
Bewildered, I stared over her shoulder at the prospective bridegroom, who smiled happily. Had he misunderstood our conversation?
With her rosebud mouth and big eyes, Angel still looked too young and pretty to be mother to so many. She wore the same black leather jacket she had on the day we met, when she angrily slammed her front door on an intrusive reporter—me. The same tiny gold angel dangled from a chain around her swanlike neck. She was still slender, except for her protruding stomach. She had come to pick up her betrothed, whose shift was about to end, she said. Was her radiance the glow generated by pregnant women or simple joy at the opportunity to somehow screw up my life again?
“Well, I know you probably want to keep it small,” I said, backing off, “and I wouldn’t want to intrude on—”
“Oh, Britt, there’s nobody I want more as my maid of honor. I’m thrilled!” She hugged my waist. “Thank you, thank you. I have a Sears catalog,” she added, “with pictures of dresses I want you to look at.”
“Dresses?”
“Bridesmaids’ dresses! Do you like a sort of salmon pink? It’s got the cutest little bustle.”
Bustle. Salmon pink. Sears. Words that would induce a migraine in my mother.
“I’m not even sure I’ll be in town then,” I lied blatantly.
“We haven’t set the date. We can build it around your schedule. We’ll know more about that when the baby comes.”
Lottie and a new shooter, named Villanueva, approached down the hall from photo, carrying coffee and a sack of doughnuts.
“Lottie!” Another puppy-dog squeal made my ears ring as Angel rushed her. I shook my head in warning, a high sign to Lottie, but, too late, her arms were open. She hugged back, exclaiming over Angel’s bulging belly as though it were a badge of honor.
My phone rang again. An agitated caller claimed to know the answer to the Jordan mystery. R. J. must not be released, she warned. He was dangerous, a killer. Both murders had happened. Kaithlin, she announced, had been twins.
“Twins? Did you know her family?”
“No, I never met any of them. But I’m sure of it. I saw a movie like that once. I think it was Meryl Streep….”
By
the time I said goodbye, Angel and Lottie were knee deep in wedding plans and it was too late to escape.
“I’d rather do a hundred hours of community service than be in Angel’s wedding,” I moaned, after the happy couple’s departure.
“It’ll be fun,” Lottie said. “Hell-all-Friday, I’m doing it, and you know her lots better than I do. I’m gonna be a bridesmaid.” She wrinkled her nose and grinned. “You love her kids and it’s a happy ending, fer God’s sake. They sure ain’t common around here. Ain’t it great to see a happy ending once in a while?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m all for happy endings, but with Angel…I swear to you, Lottie, it’ll turn into one of those weddings where the FBI arrests the groom at the altar or somebody winds up dead, face down in the cake.”
Lottie rolled her eyes. “Sometimes I swear you’ve been on the police beat too long. They’re kids in love. Ain’t it nice to see normal, happy people for a change?”
“Normal?” I said. “What about all those kids?”
“Not her fault,” Lottie said.
“I beg to differ.”
“Okay. She was Catholic and he was careless,” she said, “but they’re great kids.”
That, I couldn’t argue with. “Please,” I begged, “just promise me we will talk her out of the salmon pink. With your hair and my tan? No way.” We both winced at the image.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’ve been busting my ass on the Stairmaster to git rid-a my own built-in bustle.”
She offered me a doughnut, which I declined.
“I’ll leave one anyway,” she said, “a cruller, your favorite.”
She placed it on my desk, despite my protests, then disappeared around the corner of the wire room. Two minutes later she reappeared.
“Hey, what do you think we should get them for a wedding present? Should we chip in together?”
I couldn’t answer, caught with my mouth full of cruller.
I’d seen Martin Kagan Jr. hanging around criminal court, where he was a familiar figure, hoping for appointments from judges who had known his dad. The senior Kagan founded his own firm and served for a time as a highly respected circuit court judge. Late in life he won national recognition as a fierce crusader against capital punishment, often working pro bono to save death row inmates. His lawyer son inherited the name but somehow missed out on the character and ethics that went with it.
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