Love Kills

by Edna Buchanan

  “So, he talks to you and you write a story that lands him in jail. So when he bonds out, the first thing he does is talk to you again?” Corso said. “Was this guy a glutton for punishment, or what?”

  “No. He wanted to use me—and the newspaper—for publicity. You know the type. My story brought him the attention he wanted, but celebrity is a double-edged sword. It also resulted in his arrest. But he was convinced his trial would make him and his cause famous.”

  “Have to agree with the guy on some things,” Corso said. “But he must’ve had delusions of grandeur, thinking if he changed the system he’d be the patron saint of divorced dads.”

  “It goes without saying that he probably had a bad experience in divorce court himself,” Burch said.

  “In that first interview, in Texas,” I said, “he vaguely alluded to a long-ago divorce but didn’t go into detail.”

  “Did he say where he was going when he left the paper?”

  “All I know is that he intended to stay in Miami, study Florida law, and prepare for trial. He asked for directions to the University of Miami law library.”

  “Where was he staying?”

  I shrugged. “Up till then, Dade County Jail. Said he had to find a cheap place, a rooming house or motel.”

  “Did he mention any names, people he knew here? Anything more about the good Samaritan who posted his bond?”

  “No. I tried to call the guy for comment, but as you know, he used a false ID with a nonexistent address.”

  “You have any ideas about who killed York?”

  I shook my head. “I assume you’ve spoken to Brenda.”

  “Stone’s talked to her,” Burch said.

  “She wouldn’t have been able to post his bond,” I said. “She worked at a local IHOP. If she’d had any money, she would have hired a lawyer to get her son back. I tried to call her after York was declared a fugitive. Her phone was disconnected. A neighbor said she left town.

  “I didn’t like Spencer York,” I said, realizing as I heard my own words that it was not the wisest comment under the circumstances. “I mean, I liked the fact he’d still talk to me and probably would continue to do so, no matter what I wrote about him or how much trouble it caused him. He didn’t care what anybody wrote about him as long as they spelled his name right. We had no quarrel. He was happy. And so was I, for my own reasons. I was a rookie reporter. My interview with the Custody Crusader was one of my first stories picked up by the wire services. Larry King even talked about it on his show.”

  The detectives appeared unimpressed.

  “How did you make positive ID?”

  “Dental. Finally found a dentist he’d used in Waco,” Burch said. “His sister still lives there. Agreed to give us a DNA sample if we needed it. He was her only sibling, but they apparently weren’t close. Seemed relieved to hear he wasn’t coming back.”

  The detectives asked me to include their phone number in the story with an appeal to anyone who might have information.

  “Thanks, Britt,” Stone said. “It took a lot of nerve for you to come back here like this.”

  I shrugged, my personal and professional thoughts all jumbled together. What could I say?

  K. C. Riley was still in her office as I left. I wanted to stop and say hello, but she didn’t look up. From where I stood, she looked red in the face. I knew why, but I knocked anyway, then tentatively edged her door open.

  She looked up at me and sighed. “What is it?”

  “Thought I’d say hello.” Our eyes met.

  “Well, just look at you,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “Bigger than life and back in town.”

  I did a double take at the framed photograph in a prominent place on her bookshelf. I had seen it before but was surprised to see it still displayed in her office. Blue sky above, liquid sky below. Two people aboard a boat. She was one of them, sunshine in her hair, in cut-off shorts and a bathing suit top. Laughing as she held up a puny grouper. Major Kendall McDonald, my fiancé, stood grinning beside her, wearing a Florida Marlins baseball cap, his right hand on her shoulder.

  My mouth felt dry and my eyes began to tear. “I just wanted to let you know that I got your message and did speak to your detectives about the York case.”

  “And I got your message. I’m busy, Britt.” She picked up the papers she’d been working on.

  “Sorry to interrupt you.”

  “You make it a habit. It’s as though it’s your life’s work,” she said, as I closed the door behind me.

  I left the station biting my lip. I forced myself to focus on the story, on Spencer York and how he had so eagerly anticipated his big moment in court. It never came. By his trial date he was a wanted man, a fugitive at the center of a media frenzy, the target of a high-profile manhunt.

  How he would have loved it. But he missed it all. He never got to star in his own courtroom drama. Instead, he knew nothing, saw nothing, wrapped in a tarp, doing the big dirt sleep, with only the heat and maggots for company. Ironic, almost sad. Life is sad, I thought, and full of broken dreams.

  My pager began to chirp. Lottie. Wants to apologize, I thought righteously. It’s about time.

  I didn’t answer.

  As I drove back to the News, my cell phone rang. The caller ID displayed the photo bureau number.

  I ignored it, still stung by her words. Let her regret them a little longer, I thought. Amid the cacophony of car horns, rumbles, and traffic noises, my beeper sounded again. Three cement mixers blocked the turn onto Biscayne Boulevard as I waited through three traffic light cycles. Drivers behind me cursed and leaned on their horns as their blood pressure climbed.

  How many would stroke out? I wondered with a sigh. How would an ambulance, or a victim trying to reach an emergency room, survive this traffic gulag?

  I examined my beeper. Lottie again. This time she had punched in 911. Emergency.

  Wow, I thought, she’s really sorry. I felt guilty. She is my dearest friend. I glared at a driver trying to inch his PT Cruiser in front of me and called her, but now all I could reach was a busy signal.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Lottie’s looking for you,” said the assistant city editor I briefed on the Spencer York story.

  Moments later I scooped up the persistently ringing phone on my desk.

  “Britt?” It was her voice.

  “I’m sorry too,” I blurted.

  The silence was deafening. “Hell,” she finally said, stretching the word into two syllables. “I ain’t apologizing for nothing. You’re the one didn’t answer my messages.”

  “You’re not sorry?”

  “No way.” Before she hung up, she said, “Check your mailbox.”

  I did. Nothing special. Mostly routine press releases from the police public information office, artfully composed to impart as little information as possible, and an alert from the Coast Guard on two missing boaters….

  I almost spit up my coffee.

  A U.S. Coast Guard air and sea search was under way for newlyweds from Boston. The couple and their forty-foot trawler, Calypso Dancer, had vanished on their island-hopping honeymoon.

  The faces beneath the MISSING banner made my heart skip. The golden couple who had lost their honeymoon photos to the sea were now lost themselves.

  “Oh, my God!”

  “What’s wrong, Britt?” Ryan asked from behind me.

  I waved the flyer. “I know these people!”

  His eyes widened. “Who are they?”

  “Newlyweds. From Boston. I mean, I don’t actually know them, they’re the people whose camera we found.”

  Now we had names to match the faces: Vanessa Holt, twenty-six, and her husband, Marsh Holt, thirty-two.

  The narrative stated in stilted Coast Guard jargon that nothing had been found: no wreckage, oil slicks, or reported sightings. There had been no distress calls. The search was hampered by the fact that no one was certain how long the couple had been missing. They had filed no precise itiner
ary, and friends and family had not been immediately alarmed.

  Maybe no news is good news, I thought, staring at their faces. My phone interrupted.

  “Did you see it?” Lottie demanded impatiently.

  “It’s them,” I said urgently. “It’s them. I’m on it. Make copies of the best pictures for the city desk.”

  “Did that.” She paused. “I hope they’re not dead, Britt.”

  “Me too.”

  I called the Coast Guard, then Boston.

  “Did they find anything?” Norman Hansen, the father of the missing bride, asked when I identified myself. The fear and anguish in his voice were palpable.

  “Not yet. I just spoke to the Coast Guard. The search area is huge, but we have some photos that may help narrow it down.”

  “Something terrible happened.” His voice trembled.

  In the background his wife asked, “Is it the airline?”

  “No, Molly, a reporter,” he said. “In Miami.”

  She picked up an extension. I could hear her labored breathing.

  “This is not necessarily terrible,” I said. “They may have simply lost track of time; you know how honeymooners are.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “Nessa’s not like that. She’s extremely reliable. When she didn’t come back to start rehearsals, we knew it was something terrible.”

  “Rehearsals?”

  Vanessa, it seemed, played first cello for the Boston Symphony, quite an accomplishment at age twenty-six. The radiant girl with the long hair was a talented musician. Their pride was evident despite their panic and anxiety. The newlyweds had been due back in Boston on Friday. Rehearsals began on Monday. The weekend had come and gone without a word, a call, or a message.

  “She devoted her whole life to music, to the Symphony,” her father said, “until she met Marsh. He’s a wonderful young man. We were so happy. But when they didn’t come back and didn’t call, we knew.”

  His wife choked back a sob. “We feel so helpless…. We’re trying to book a flight.”

  “We’re coming down,” he said, “to look for them.”

  “Don’t be so quick to assume the worst.” I tried to comfort them. “Island time is different. Things move more slowly. They may have engine trouble, could be marooned somewhere. Maybe adrift. Coast Guard Search and Rescue is good. They’ll find them. Last week they rescued several boaters who’d been adrift for five days. Wait a day or two. It’s a big ocean. There’s not much you could do here now. When they do come home,” I added cheerfully, “this will be a story you’ll tell your grandchildren someday.”

  “Please God.” His wife choked.

  I asked how to reach Marsh’s parents.

  “He lost them at an early age,” Molly Hansen said. “He has little family, but he fit right in with us. He’s the son we never had. We love him and he loves us.” An engineer from the Midwest, he had met Vanessa shortly after his transfer to Boston and he had swept her off her feet: love at first sight, or something close to it. He proposed only months after they met, after first asking her parents’ permission.

  The wedding was lavish and rich in music. Fellow musicians had performed; others were members of the wedding party. Marsh had rented the Calypso Dancer for their romantic two-week island-hopping honeymoon.

  The parents sounded sweet and scared silly. Vanessa was their only child.

  “Don’t panic,” I said again. “No news is good news at this point. No distress calls went out. There have been no reports of a boat in trouble. No wreckage has been spotted. I’ll stay on it and call you the minute I hear anything.” The Hansens, in turn, promised to lend the News one of the couple’s wedding pictures. Lottie arranged for a Boston service to pick it up at their home and transmit it.

  The frightened parents sounded temporarily reassured by the time I hung up. Now I regretted my initial envy of Vanessa and Marsh, husband and wife for less than four weeks. How random fate and Mother Nature can be, I thought. How quickly life can turn on a dime.

  Had the newlyweds been swallowed by the shadowy seas of the Bermuda Triangle? Were they targeted by pirates or drug smugglers? Or are they simply still out there, I wondered wistfully, sipping daiquiris and making love on a palm-lined stretch of sugar-white beach, having lost all track of time?

  The last option had my vote.

  Between calls to the Coast Guard, I contacted local feminists and politicians for reactions to the fate of the Custody Crusader. The once-outraged prosecutor was now a prominent criminal defense attorney. The deposed judge, caught up in a career-crashing whirlwind of criticism and controversy for releasing Spencer York on low bond, was beyond mortal reach, dead for more than a year. Too bad, I thought. He would have felt vindicated. When Spencer York failed to appear for trial, it was not the fault of a too-lenient judge. An unknown killer was the culprit.

  Whoever murdered York and hid his corpse had effectively killed the judge’s career and reputation as well.

  The voices now were not as strident as at the height of the controversy. Laws had changed. Miami was a different city. The most vocal critics had moved on to other issues, other outrages. Some had left South Florida, others were gone from the planet. Miami is known for its short memory, which may be why we keep making the same mistakes.

  He was no longer politically controversial, but the legend of Spencer York’s disappearance had now morphed into a murder mystery, a good read. It was time to introduce the Custody Crusader posthumously to a whole new generation of Miami News readers.

  I called York’s sister, Sheila, near Waco. She hung up. Unlike her brother, she obviously didn’t like talking to reporters and didn’t want her name in the newspaper. I sighed. How could siblings be so different? Did they share the same father? I wondered. Had Spencer York been granted a onetime opportunity to speak out from beyond the grave, it would have been to a reporter.

  As usual when people hang up on me, I counted to ten and redialed.

  “Britt Montero again,” I said sweetly. “We were cut off. Sorry. It must be the thunderstorm we’re having. I know this is a bad time, how upset you must be at the loss of your brother, but we need some information about Spencer. I hate talking to strangers when I know you’re the most accurate source.”

  As usual, it worked.

  “What kind of information?” she said warily.

  “Just a little background,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “Was he your only brother?”

  “There was another, but he died when he was two, fell down the well.”

  “How awful. So there were just the two of you growing up together?”

  “Yes. We were three years apart. He was the oldest.”

  “What is it that you remember most about your brother?” I asked.

  “Difficult. He was always difficult. We weren’t close.”

  “I know how that can be.” I did sympathize. “But it’s never easy. It’s always hard to lose a family member, especially a sibling.”

  She must have some positive childhood memory of the man, however fleeting, I thought. Hopefully, he said or did something decent, had been kind to his sister at least once in his life. “Even if you weren’t close, he was still family.”

  “You’re right,” she said. The little catch in her throat seemed to surprise even her. “I guess you sort of think what it might’ve been like, had Spencer not been the way he was. I always thought the wrong brother had died as a child, or that maybe they mixed Spencer up with somebody else’s baby in the maternity ward, and he wasn’t really related to us. That sort of thing does happen.”

  It piqued her interest to hear I had met Spencer myself. The last time she spoke to him, he had called collect, she said, from Miami. She accepted the charges because she hadn’t heard from him for nearly two years and thought it might be an emergency. He told her to read the papers and watch the TV news, boasting that she’d soon see and hear his name.

  She’d been embarrassed when she did see his
name—on wanted posters. Deputies visited her home several times that first year or so, to determine whether she was harboring the fugitive sought for jumping bond in Miami. They asked if Spencer had been in contact with her. He hadn’t. She feared he might. That possibility unnerved her every time a car door slammed, the doorbell rang, or the dogs barked. But after five years or so, she confided, she had come to believe that Spencer was dead.

  I asked why.

  “Because, you know,” she said matter-of-factly, “bad pennies have a way of turning up.”

  Made sense.

  I wrote the story, my impressions of York’s dysfunctional family mingling with the plight of the warm, close-knit Hansens, who now faced the painful possibility of loved ones lost.

  There are families, I thought, and then there are families.

  That reminded me to call my mother.

  I had intended to wait but decided I had better make contact before she saw my byline in the newspaper.

  Should I invite her to my apartment? Go to hers? Or meet her on neutral turf, in a public place?

  I turned in my stories, went over the copy with Bobby, the assistant city editor in the slot, to be sure he had no questions or drastic changes in mind, and then called her.

  “I’m at work but I’ll be off soon,” I said. “Want to grab a bite somewhere, or stop by my apartment for a snack or a drink?”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” She sounded crestfallen. “How I wish you’d called sooner. I’m meeting Russell for drinks at the Van Dyke at ten. But I can stop on the way for a cup of tea, a hug, and a word about the divine new things we’re showing in the fall. I’ve already seen a darling little form-fitting white sheath that has your name written all over it.”

  I laughed out loud.

  “It’s so good to hear your voice,” she said warmly. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Love you, Mom.”

  I raced home. No time for elaborate preparations, she’d arrive in less than an hour. I cleaned out Billy’s sandbox, found some green tea and crackers in the cupboard, and took Bitsy for a quick walk around the block.