“Thanks, Abe. I’ll see you tomorrow at seven.”
“You bet.”
I hung up, breathing in the silence of my office. The broken pencil lead lay on my yellow notepad, tiny gray shavings sprayed across the last word I had written: red.
Santos had provided only basic and generic information, and it could have fit thousands of women. But every now and then, sometimes out of the blue, and even after the passage of nineteen months, I still got little reminders of how raw and recent my own loss could feel, which made it disconcerting to hear a homicide victim described in such a familiar way, down to the race, age, height, weight, and choice of nail polish.
It could have been Samantha.
Chapter Four
I headed home around nine thirty, the end of a fifteen-hour Monday. I called my wife from the car to let her know I was on my way. Angelina sounded as tired as I felt.
“Okay, see you soon,” she said.
We were newlyweds, technically speaking, married just seven months. But Angelina and I had met pre-Samantha, having dated a year before we moved in together and shared an apartment for eighteen months. No breakup was easy, but sometimes it was best to move on. I fell in love with Samantha and got married; Angelina dated a couple of different guys, nothing serious. When Samantha died, Angelina reached out on Facebook. The friendship rebuilt itself, and with time, it became a relationship renewed. All told, pre- and post-Samantha, I’d been romantically involved with Angelina longer than with any other woman in my life. Still, it’s weird when you’re white and everyone, black and white, finds it a little strange that you married a white woman. Some folks were more discreet about it than others. J.T.’s toast at the wedding reception, an awkward attempt at humor, hadn’t exactly endeared him to my new wife: “Damn, Abe. From black to blond. Now you’s just like a brotha.”
Angelina was on the couch watching The Bachelor when I got home.
“I made dinner for you,” she said, staring at the TV.
“Thank you.” I leaned over from behind the couch to kiss her, but got only her cheek.
“Two hours ago,” she said. “It’s cold now.”
I laid my suit jacket on the chair and went to the kitchen. Angelina was a great cook, and her spaghetti Bolognese was awesome, even if microwaved. I brought my plate out and sat beside her on the couch.
“This is delicious,” I said.
“Glad you like it. How did it go with J.T. today?”
I drank some water, then breathed a sigh. “Poor guy. He’s kind of a mess. But he’s back on his meds, so hopefully—”
“This is what I mean,” she said, stopping me.
“What?”
She hit the mute button on the TV, then sat up straight, squaring her shoulders toward me. “You give so much to him, and then you come home all worked up.”
“I’m not worked up.”
“Yes, you are. Listen to yourself. You’re home less than five minutes, and all I hear about is J.T.”
“You asked me about J.T. So I answered.”
“Of course I asked. I have to ask. I need to know if I’m going to have all of my husband, half of my husband, a quarter of him—what part of Abe are you going to give to your wife this week?”
This was becoming her M.O. Angelina prepared her words in advance, and no matter how our conversation developed, no matter how forced the route to the trigger point, Angelina would unload the speech on me.
“I’m really tired, Angelina. Can we talk about something else?”
She got up and went into the kitchen.
“Shit,” I muttered, but there was no one to hear me. I grabbed the remote and found the Heat game. They were up by thirty-five in the fourth period, so at ten o’clock I switched to the local news.
“Serial Killer in Miami?” was the lead story, the question mark reflecting the lack of confirmation that the most recent victim was connected to the Palm Beach murders.
Angelina came out of the kitchen and stood behind the couch, watching from over my shoulder.
“Are you working this case?” she asked.
“Yup. Sure am.”
“A machete,” she said, wincing. “Horrible.”
“Yeah. It is.”
“Why are they being so cagey about whether the murders are connected? Five women all hacked with a machete, all found in the Everglades.”
“It’s the first one found in Miami-Dade. And it’s the first black victim.”
“Yeah, and I suppose it could also be the first body recovered on a Monday with the wind blowing out of the northwest at thirteen miles per hour. I swear, sometimes I think you guys overanalyze these things. Do you really believe this is a coincidence?”
“It’s more complicated than you might think.”
“If you say so.”
Our landline rang. Angelina answered it. The serial killer coverage was wrapping up on television when she handed me the phone.
“It’s J.T.,” she said, her tone colder than the dinner she’d left me in the kitchen.
“Tell him I’ll call him first thing in the morning.”
“No, take it.”
“I don’t want to take it.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I really don’t.”
“Don’t put him off just because you think I’m mad. He sounds a little wired. Last thing I need is you blaming me if J.T. goes off and hangs himself.”
“That’s not funny, Angelina.”
I took the phone. “Wired” was an understatement.
“Abe, I gotta get this thing off me!”
He was so loud that I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “Calm down,” I said. “What thing?”
“The thing! The fucking bracelet!”
“Listen to me, J.T. This is very important. You cannot take off the bracelet. If you do, the judge will put you in jail.”
“They’re listening to me.”
“What?”
“That’s what this thing is for. They can hear everything I say.”
I wondered who might be on the other end of a conversation with a guy who lived alone, but that was another issue. “It’s just a bracelet,” I said. “No one is listening.”
“Yes. Yes, they are. They can hear me, and they can see me, too. I gotta get it off, Abe!”
“J.T., no one can—”
“I gotta get it off right now!”
“J.T., please. I want you to breathe for me. Nice and deep. In and out, in and out, all right?”
I listened, but I didn’t like what I was hearing. J.T. was practically panting.
“Slower, J.T. Much slower.” I gave him a moment. “That’s better. I’m going to hang up and—”
“No, don’t!”
“Listen to what I’m saying, J.T. I’m going to call you right back on my cell phone, and then I’ll drive over. Promise me you won’t touch the bracelet till I get there. Will you promise me that?”
I could hear him breathing. It sounded like such a chore.
“J.T.? Will you promise me that?”
More breathing on the line. “Still too fast, J.T. Slower. Breathe slowly, and I’ll be there in just a few minutes.”
“Okay,” he said. “But hurry.”
I hung up, grabbed my cell phone and car keys, and went to Angelina. “Sorry, honey. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She just shook her head, more resignation than anger. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“No, I’m not staying over this time.”
She just looked at me, both of us knowing the truth.
“Go, Abe,” she said in a flat, detached voice. “Go take care of your family.”
I went out the door and closed it, but before I was even halfway down the front steps I heard Angelina lock it with the chain. I was about to turn around, try to find the right thing to say to her, when my cell rang. It was J.T.
“Abe, where are you, man? I gotta get this thing—”
“Okay, okay, I’m on my way.”
/> He kept talking, and I kept listening and telling him that it was going to be okay as I got in my car and drove to his apartment. Again.
Chapter Five
My meeting with Agent Santos was set for 7:00 a.m. at the medical center. Fifteen minutes before the hour I was still crawling along in traffic on the 836 expressway. Miami’s rush hour seemed to peak earlier every time I got in the car.
“Gonna be a little late,” was the message I left on Santos’ voice mail.
My sleepover with J.T. had involved very little sleep. No fault of my brother-in-law—he got plenty of rest. I was the problem. The way Angelina had locked the door with the chain, telling me to stay with my “family,” hit me like a message not to come home. That alone was enough to keep me awake all night. The complicating factor was that any visit to J.T.’s apartment was a trip to my past. Samantha and I had once lived there. The furniture had been ours. The draperies, rugs, wallpaper, and every other touch had been Samantha’s. It had been Samantha’s wish that J.T. have a place to live, and I was doing my best to make it happen. A nice thing, if good intentions counted for anything; but I still felt guilty about it, the kind of guilt that kept a man up all night. It had set in long after J.T. had gone to sleep, when I’d headed upstairs to the guest room. I’d ended up sleeping on the couch. No way I could sleep in the bed that had been our bed, where I had lain next to Samantha, whispered in the dark, listened to her breathe, felt her heartbeat, discovered and rediscovered those legs of silk. She had killer legs. So firm, so strong, the way they squeezed my head in a vise grip as she reached climax. One night stood out for me.
“I love doing that to you,” I’d told her.
“I’m glad you love it.”
“I mean, I really love it.”
“I’m just happy to have a man who wants to do something other than hit it from behind.”
It was a joke, but she would have done better to save it for her girlfriends. “TMI, Samantha. Way too much information.”
“Sorry.”
“You kind of killed the mood.”
She kissed me, and I saw that look in her eye that every man wants to see, a look that made the past irrelevant, because going forward, no man but me would get it from this beautiful woman who had promised to be forever my wife.
She threw her leg over my waist, mounting me, the fullness of her breasts staring me in the face, the smell of her hair drawing me in.
“I’ll fix that,” she said as she slid beneath the sheets. “I’ll fix it real good.”
The Miami-Dade County medical examiner’s office is in the Joseph H. Davis Center for Forensic Pathology, a three-building complex on the perimeter of the University of Miami Medical Center campus and Jackson Memorial Hospital. Mornings were always busy around Jackson. Medical breakthroughs in everything from spinal injuries to cancer were woven into the institutional fabric here, and every day patients flooded in from across the country and beyond to see some of the most respected doctors in the world. In a way, that had made it even tougher to accept Samantha’s prognosis.
I parked as close as I could to the examiner’s office and ended up being just five minutes late for the meeting.
“Dr. Hernandez is ready for us,” said Santos.
I knew Doc Hernandez, and I knew well enough to leave my jacket on when entering his examination room. Frigid air gushed from the air-conditioning vents like the north wind from Canada. Bright lights glistened off the white sterile walls and buffed tile floors. Doc Hernandez waited for us behind the stainless steel table, a white sheet covering the mound before him. Doc adjusted the spotlight overhead before lifting the sheet.
“Now, be forewarned,” he told us. “Nothing that comes straight from the Everglades to the medical examiner’s office is ever a pretty sight.”
“I understand,” said Santos.
I wondered if she really did. Even though Santos was an experienced agent with forensics training from Quantico, nothing had really prepared me for that first autopsy of a victim recovered in the Everglades.
Doc pulled back the lower corner of the sheet. I braced myself, but the body was in much better condition than I had expected. Bloated, to be sure. The victim had been properly bagged while still in the water, and we were seeing firsthand how the organism-rich Everglades enhanced the usual release of acids and gases during putrefaction. I had to look away as my gaze drifted to where the head should have been.
“If this was July,” Doc said, “and if we were talking about days instead of hours in the Everglades, we’d see highly accelerated decomposition, not to mention evidence of predators. But with the lower winter water temperatures and relatively quick recovery, we have much more to work with.”
“When you say ‘relatively quick recovery,’ what timeline are you estimating?” I asked.
“Twenty-four hours,” said Doc. “Perhaps a little longer. I’d say we’re looking at a late Saturday night homicide.”
“Any evidence of sexual assault?” I asked.
“Not vaginally or anally,” Doc said.
Santos chimed in with the unspoken variable. “There was evidence of forcible oral sodomy in all of Cutter’s previous victims.”
Doc shone the spotlight on the very place my eyes did not want to go. “Obviously that’s something we can’t determine, given the incomplete condition of the cadaver.”
“It also prevents us from confirming Cutter’s signature,” said Santos. “Unless your examination has found traces of sugarcane ash elsewhere on the body.”
“Negative,” said Doc. “But let’s talk about the wounds.”
The doctor brought his laptop computer to the table. He scrolled through dozens of forensic photographs, searching for the right one. “Here we go,” he said, freezing the image.
It was an autopsy of a young woman, her naked body on the steel table, positioned much the same way as victim number five before me. “This is Elizabeth Gowan,” said Doc, “victim number three. Her body presented much the same as all of the Palm Beach victims. We see multiple strikes against the victim with a machete or similar blade,” he said, using the cursor to point out each one.
“Lots of anger,” said Santos.
I glanced at the body on the table. “We don’t see that on this victim.”
“Exactly. And there’s something else.”
He clicked forward to the next image on the screen. It was a close-up shot of the side of the victim’s neck, a horrendous gaping wound. Some law enforcement officers could remain clinical about these things, as if the autopsy were a medical textbook. Even after dozens of murder trials, thousands of gruesome exhibits, it still pained me to look.
“Here’s what I find interesting,” said Doc. “In the Gowan case, like all the Palm Beach cases, the fatal blow was probably a strike to the side of the neck, which severed the carotid artery. This is a gaping wound with exsanguination, massive blood loss.”
“But there was no beheading in any of the Palm Beach cases,” said Santos.
“That’s correct. Truth is, unless you are a skilled executioner, it requires several strong blows to take off someone’s head with a machete or a sword.”
“But we have a beheading here,” I said.
“In fact, we don’t,” said Doc.
Both Santos and I glanced at the body, the obvious contradiction.
Doc shook his head. “Predator. Alligators have razor-sharp teeth. They don’t do well with large prey, so it’s no surprise that one might happen by the body, bite off what it could, and then move on. Look here,” he said, shining his light on the wound. “These are alligator teeth marks. And here,” he said, pointing, “the flesh is torn. This is not a cutting or chopping motion with a machete. This is the typical alligator ripping and tearing, which from the standpoint of the average five-foot-long alligator is way too much work for a meal. That’s why even though Florida Fish and Game gets twelve thousand complaints about alligators every year, we see only four or five actual attacks on humans. And in
the last seventy-five years, only a couple dozen fatalities. They like birds and turtles that they can swallow whole.”
“So this is not a dismemberment case,” said Santos.
“Correct.”
“Which brings it in line with the Palm Beach cases, where there was no dismemberment.”
“That’s true,” Doc said. “But again, we don’t have the multiple blows to the torso that we had in Palm Beach. We see no defensive wounds on the hands or arms, which we would expect if the victim were fighting off her attacker. And there are no ligature marks on the wrists or ankles, which would indicate that she was bound and restrained.”
“Those are all significant differences,” said Santos.
“And I may be able to explain them,” said Doc.
“Please do,” said Santos.
“As I mentioned, while we see multiple blows in the Palm Beach cases, the fatal blow was probably the neck wound. My initial fear was that the alligator attack would make it impossible to determine whether this victim had a neck wound like the Palm Beach victims.”
“Are you saying you can make that comparison?” asked Santos.
“Not definitively. But I have a preliminary leaning,” said Doc.
He shone the spotlight on the cadaver, focusing on the neck wound. “It’s hard to see from this angle, with the cadaver on its back. Let me show you the photos I took earlier.” He went to his laptop again, brought up the image, and then zoomed in. “Do you see this laceration at the base of the neck?”
“I see it.”
“Again, we have the confounding effect of the predator. But focus in particular on that smooth edge right there.”
I leaned closer. It was surrounded by the ripping and tearing of the alligator’s teeth, but an inch-long section of the wound did have a smooth quality. “It does look different,” I said.
“I’m reasonably certain that this was a knife wound,” Doc said.
“So this case is like the Palm Beach cases?” I asked.
“Ah, that’s where this gets interesting,” said Doc. “The wound suffered by each of the victims in Palm Beach was to the sternocleidomastoid muscle. That’s the same muscle that football players bulk up to get that no-neck look. If you’re a Trekkie, like me, it’s the muscle that good aliens always have and bad aliens never have, because this particular muscle is a uniquely mammalian feature that makes creatures appealing to the human eye.”
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