Cane and Abe

by James Grippando

  “How romantic.”

  “Listen to me. The sixth telephone number that showed up on Tyla’s prepaid phone record has never been identified. That’s because the call was from another prepaid phone, one just as untraceable as Tyla’s. But I know who was on that other phone.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone else,” he said, leaning closer. “My point is this: I never slept with Tyla. The only time I spoke to her on her prepaid cell phone was to make arrangements for her ‘afternoons’ with someone else.”

  I knew exactly who he meant.

  Belter slid the check across the table. It was payable to me. “I was just a go-between. Tyla must have made mention of that to you,” he said.

  I stared right back at him. There were a lot of things I could have said, many names I could have called him. But my body was running on empty, and even the launch of a verbal attack seemed like wasted effort.

  “Don’t ever call me again,” I said.

  I walked away, leaving the check on the table, and went back to the command center.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The two-block walk from the coffee shop back to the command center did me good. My temper cooled, and I refocused. But I would never forget.

  Brian Belter had not heard the last from me.

  We were thirty minutes out from our press conference. I wanted to check in with Margaret and Jake to see how they were holding up. Rid intercepted me in the hallway before I reached the ballroom. He took me to a conference room near the business suite that had been converted into a makeshift green room. Someone had pushed the large rectangular table against the wall and brought in a couch and two additional armchairs for extra seating. Carmen Jimenez rose to greet me. It was just the three of us.

  “How are you, Abe?” she said in a sincere voice.

  I could have lied; I could have told the truth. What would it have mattered? “Thanks for coming, but you didn’t have to,” I said.

  “I wanted to,” she said. “First, some good news. People in the office are totally behind you. There’s another five thousand dollars to kick in to the reward fund.”

  “Thank you. That means a lot,” I said. But I knew that good news was usually paired with bad.

  “Sit down, Abe,” she said.

  Especially when someone tells you to sit. I took the armchair. She took the other one. Rid was behind her, leaning on the edge of the desk.

  “I know about the polygraph,” she said.

  “Carmen, I did not kill Angelina.”

  “I know you failed.”

  “I’ll say it again: I did not kill my wife. The questions were bad. Just look at that third question, where he asked—”

  “Abe, you failed on all three questions.”

  I went cold. Have you ever seen your wife dead? Did you kill your wife? Did you have anything to do with your wife’s disappearance?

  “That’s not possible,” I said.

  “I know the examiner,” said Carmen. “I talked to him.”

  “Did he show you the report?”

  “Santos won’t let him share it with anyone. But he wouldn’t lie to me about that. You failed.”

  “They’re bad questions, Carmen. The first question, Have you ever seen your wife dead? There was no opportunity for me to clarify the question, but I knew he was asking about Angelina, so my answer was simply no. But yes, of course I’ve seen my wife dead. For God’s sake, I buried Samantha!”

  “I agree with you,” said Carmen. “Number three is bad, too. But it’s question two that troubles me.”

  Did you kill your wife?

  “Polygraphs are not infallible,” I said. “You know that. We all know that. That’s why no court in America has ever allowed them into evidence at trial.”

  “I understand,” said Carmen. “It could have been the series of questions, it could have been the examiner, it could have been fatigue on your part, it could have been the stress of everything that has happened.”

  “It could have been all those things,” I said.

  “Could have been,” said Carmen. “Here’s the deal, Abe. First, I want you out of the news conference. I’ll do it with Angelina’s parents.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons,” said Carmen. “I don’t want anyone blindsiding you with a polygraph question. Rumors are circulating, and this could go badly for you.”

  “I can handle myself,” I said.

  “Possibly. But that doesn’t solve the bigger problem: Jake doesn’t want you there.”

  I wasn’t shocked. But it still hurt. “I want to be there.”

  “Don’t force it, Abe. You did your job with the local media yesterday. Let Angelina’s parents take the lead and announce the reward tonight. They’re putting in twenty-five grand of their own money as it is.”

  “It will look odd if I’m not there.”

  “It will look worse if Jake refuses to stand within twenty-five feet of you.”

  “Far worse,” said Rid.

  It was two against one, and the one was wavering. “Media coverage is only going to intensify,” I said. “I can’t go around dodging cameras and microphones and saying ‘no comment.’”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Carmen. “So here’s the plan. Your in-laws and I will do the press conference. You and Riddel will leave before it even starts, and I will explain that you are busy assisting investigators in the search for your wife. Tonight, you do whatever it takes to get a good night’s sleep. Take an Ambien if you have to. In the morning, you will be rested, and we are going to redo the polygraph examination. When it’s over, you can face all the media questions you want.”

  When it’s over. What she really meant was, If you pass. I left that alone. “Will it be the same examiner?”

  “No. The FBI will not be part of this. We’ll use someone I know and trust and who will frame the questions properly.”

  “But not someone I know,” I said. “If I’m going to do this, I don’t want anyone claiming that the redo was rigged.”

  “No one you know,” said Carmen.

  I was trying to find the flaw in it, but I couldn’t. This all made sense. And it felt good to know that there were at least two people—two people who really mattered—who didn’t have me at the top of their list of suspects.

  “Okay,” I said. “We have a plan.”

  Carmen seemed pleased. The three of us shook on it and went to the door. Carmen went one way, toward the ballroom. Rid and I went the other way, avoiding the crowd. We took a side exit to the parking lot and got in his car. No one saw us as we drove away and merged into traffic on US 1.

  It was a stupid thing to say, but I couldn’t help myself. “Now all I have to do is pass the stupid test,” I said, chuckling nervously.

  “Don’t redo it if you don’t want to, Abe.”

  I was looking at him from the passenger seat, but his eyes remained fixed on the road. “No, I like Carmen’s plan,” I said. “This is something I need to do.”

  We stopped at a red light. Rid glanced across the console, looking right at me. “Abe, I’m speaking to you as a friend now, not a detective.”

  “Okay, let’s hear it, friend.”

  “What you probably need is a lawyer.”

  Rid and I watched the Find Angelina news conference on the TV at the police station. Easy viewing it wasn’t. Jake spoke first, reading from a prepared script, which was the only way to get through it.

  “Angelina’s family and friends are pleading with anyone who may know anything about her disappearance, her whereabouts, or”—he paused, his voice quaking—“or her fate. Please call the Miami-Dade Police Department at the number on your television screen, or leave information at the Find Angelina Beckham website. A reward of one hundred thousand dollars is being offered for information leading to her safe return.”

  The microphone passed from Jake to Carmen, but the camera angle was wide enough for me to see Margaret at Jake’s side. Carmen said exactly the right thing
, my esteemed and credible proxy, but I hardly processed a word of it. My entire focus was on Angelina’s mother. I could almost feel the sadness, the exhaustion, the worry, the dwindling sense of hope pressing down on her shoulders. Her heart was not merely broken. It was shredded, the pieces falling away live and on camera for all the world to see, the sadness gathering in pools of despair around her, bottomless pools that could drown the most robust spirit.

  I truly wondered if Margaret was going to live through this.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  We left the Miami-Dade police station at eight o’clock. Rid drove me to my car and went home to his wife. I wasn’t sure where to spend the night. I wasn’t sure I could handle J.T. I drove west on the Tamiami Trail until I reached the one-mile bridge. I parked on the shoulder and walked to the guardrail and looked out into the night. Nothing but the unending blackness of the Everglades lay before me. The shoreline along the canal was no longer a crime scene. The search for Angelina along this stretch of the highway was over, at least for the night. Maybe they’d return in the morning. Maybe a new lead would break overnight and shift the search to another location. Maybe grim news would end all hopes.

  The thought made my head spin.

  We were closing in on that all-important forty-eight-hour mark since Angelina had gone missing. Time was ticking. Some people said it was the first sixty hours that were crucial, but if you hear that, you are probably speaking to a man who is in hour forty-nine of the search for his wife. I had questions that needed to be answered before it was too late. I called Rid.

  “How long did Cutter hold his victims before he killed them?”

  “Abe, don’t do this to yourself.”

  “I need to know. How much time do we have?”

  “It varied.”

  “What was the longest he held any of them?”

  “This is not an exact science. You have to know exactly when the victim disappeared, and the medical estimate of time of death is always just that, an estimate.”

  “Fine, we’re estimating. What’s the longest he held any of his victims before he killed them? Three days? Two days? One?”

  Rid didn’t answer right away. “Less,” he said finally.

  “A matter of hours, then?”

  “Yes. Except the first victim.”

  “She was held longer?” I asked, hopeful.

  “Her body was found burned in the cane field. No way to estimate her time of death, so no way to know how much time elapsed between her disappearance and her death.”

  I took a breath. “Okay. Thanks. That’s helpful.”

  “No, it’s not. Take Carmen’s advice and get some sleep, Abe. That would be helpful.”

  We hung up. I took another long look at the Everglades, a panoramic view, my gaze sweeping across utter blackness. I wondered how many bodies this amazing body of water had never given up. I wondered if Angelina’s would be among them.

  She had warned me, actually. I daresay she had predicted this moment. I had forgotten the conversation, but it came flooding back to me in J.T.’s bedroom after we sang that song together, when J.T. called out to me in the darkness and asked, “What are you grateful for, Abe?” Angelina had asked me the same thing in a little different way, and a very different tone of voice. In fact, she had been screaming, tears streaming down her face.

  “Damn it, Abe! I’m nice, I’m pretty, I deserve to be treated better than this. Someday you’re going to stop licking your wounds, stop living in the past, and wake up. But it’s going to be too late! Because I’ll be gone, and then you’ll realize how much you miss me.”

  Be grateful.

  I started the car. My phone rang. It was J.T. I almost didn’t answer. I was sure he wanted me to come over. Just one more ring, and it would have gone to voice mail. Something made me pick up. He sounded anything but calm.

  “Abe, you gotta get over here right now!”

  I knew it. “What is it now, J.T.?”

  “The cops are here.”

  “What? Why?”

  “They have a search warrant.”

  It was hard to think straight, but it was Rid’s offhanded advice that rang most clearly in my mind. What you probably need is a lawyer. A huge heads-up from a friend who couldn’t come right out and tell me what was in the works, and I had ignored it.

  “J.T., listen to me carefully. Do not interfere with the police. But I want you to repeat these words: Officer, I do not consent to the search for any item not listed in the warrant, and I do not consent to the search of any place not described in the warrant.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, don’t say ‘Okay.’ Repeat what I just said.”

  He tried. He flubbed it.

  “J.T., where are the cops now?”

  “My bedroom.”

  “Stay on the phone, walk into the bedroom, and stand in a place where the cops can hear you. I’ll tell you exactly what to say to them.”

  “Okay,” he said, and I could sense that he was moving. “I’m in the room.”

  I fed him the mantra in bite-size segments, and I told him to say it loud enough for the cops, the neighbors, and even the dead to hear him. Officer, I do not consent . . .

  “Good job,” I told him. “Now sit tight. I’ll be right there.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The search was ongoing when I reached J.T.’s apartment. Two MDPD squad cars were parked out front. A uniformed officer was posted at the door. Rather than trying to explain that I was the brother-in-law who used to live there and still paid the rent, I simply flashed my badge, identified myself as an assistant state attorney, and walked in. I found J.T. right inside the front door, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, clutching an empty box of Raisin Bran. His hands were shaking, his body a bundle of nerves.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  I’d seen the apartment a mess before, but nothing like this. Rugs peeled back. Furniture pulled away from the walls. Seat cushions scattered across the floor. And that was just in the living room. J.T. was staring straight ahead, a blank expression on his face.

  “They dumped out the last of my food.”

  I glanced toward the kitchen, which was quiet, and there wasn’t a cop in sight. But I could hear them down the hall in J.T.’s bedroom.

  “Did they give you a copy of the warrant?”

  J.T. opened his fist, offering up the warrant, which he’d squeezed into a tight ball of legal mumbo-jumbo. I unwound the wad and read the description of the item to be confiscated: “one prepaid cellular phone, manufacturer unknown.” I suddenly realized what this was about, and not just because Brian Belter had mentioned the prepaid cellular phone at the coffee shop three hours earlier.

  “I knew they’d come for me,” J.T. said, breathless, the way he got on the verge of a panic attack. “Bad shit happens when you put on these fucking bracelets. I gotta get this thing off me, Abe.”

  “No one is coming for you, J.T. I’m here now. This is a problem we can fix. Just wait here.”

  “Right, okay.”

  His voice shook, not a good sign, but I had to sort this out. I walked to the bedroom, where I found Agent Santos and Detective Reyes. A Miami-Dade officer was rummaging through dresser drawers. Another was picking apart the closet.

  Santos stopped me in the doorway. “Wait in the hall, please.”

  I took a step back, technically outside the bedroom. “You know it’s not here,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know damn well that my brother-in-law wasn’t speaking to Tyla Tomkins on a prepaid cell phone.”

  “We’ll find out.”

  One of the officers lifted the mattress and pushed it against the wall. He found nothing.

  “This is a fishing expedition,” I said. “That pesky Fourth Amendment keeps you from barging in here without probable cause, so you pretend to search for a cell phone, which you know isn’t here, and you hope something else turns up. Are you really this desperate?”
r />   “Are you really this concerned that something else might turn up?”

  “J.T. has already put you on notice that he does not consent to a search for anything not listed in the warrant.”

  “Good luck with that,” she said.

  Prosecutors and defense lawyers argued every day over confiscated items not listed in the warrant: a gun found in a search for contraband, a knife found in a search for a pair of shoes. If the police search for a murder weapon and don’t find it, the defense exploits that point at trial. Better to search for a phone and hope for a bloody machete.

  “What are you looking for, Santos?”

  “A cell phone.”

  “What are you really looking for? Just tell me. If I know where it is, I’ll give it to you, and we don’t have to tear apart J.T.’s apartment.”

  She didn’t answer. An officer emerged from the walk-in closet. He was finished. Nothing.

  “Try outside on the deck,” Santos told him.

  “Hold on,” I said as I checked the warrant. J.T.’s apartment had a backyard no bigger than the living room. Home Depot and I had built that deck to Samantha’s specifications.

  The officer walked past me and started down the hall. I followed.

  “You don’t have a warrant to search outside,” I said.

  He continued through the living room, toward the sliding glass doors off the kitchen. I pulled out my iPhone and videoed him. “Stop right there,” I said. “Your warrant does not cover the deck or any area outside the apartment. This is an illegal search.”

  It got the attention of Agent Santos.

  “Don’t go out,” she told the officer. Santos didn’t look happy, but my reading of the warrant was correct.

  The other officer called her back to the bedroom. I followed her back down the hallway, starting to feel a bit like a yo-yo. She made me stop in the doorway, but I had a clear view into the room.

  “Take a look at this,” he told her. The bottom drawer of J.T.’s nightstand was open. A small stack of magazines was piled up on the floor, as if the officer had pulled them from the drawer, one by one, then stopped when something caught his interest. Santos peered into the drawer, but I couldn’t see that far.