I listlessly forced down Rice Krispies with milk, along with a banana for potassium, and drove to the paper early.
Where else did I have to go?
Nagging images from my dark dreams overnight nudged persistently at my consciousness. Spencer York’s angry accusing eyes, their righteous indignation magnified by the thick lenses of his spectacles, his slightly stooped, bulky, middle-aged frame in incongruous combat fatigues. That tough-talking, harmless-looking fellow was no lovable curmudgeon, nobody’s favorite uncle. He considered himself a warrior, at war with women.
I had rented a car in Texas, and as we drove somewhere, chatting during our day-long interview, his harangue about women became so offensive and vitriolic I had to restrain myself from pulling over and physically kicking him out of the passenger seat and into a roadside ditch.
I have spent time talking to serial murderers, Satan worshipers, crooked cops, wife beaters, and baby killers and never lost my cool. But Spencer York was something else.
He spewed outrageous theories: for example, that most women are totally unaware of basic feminine hygiene, accounting for what he described as America’s huge epidemic of yeast infections and the resulting profits to pharmaceutical companies.
He chortled when he described how he stalked Brenda Cunningham, how he wrenched little Jason away from her as she screamed, begged, and struggled. He had spied on her in the dark and it paid off, he gloated. He had personally seen her leave in a car with a man and return home close to midnight. Proof positive, he said, that she was an unclean disease-spreading slut and a totally unfit mother. He wished he could have used a baseball bat, he said regretfully, instead of mere Mace when she dared fight to keep her son.
He had clearly tried to provoke me. Would the last person he provoked ever be prosecuted?
And, if so, would a jury convict? Some people would probably want to shower the killer with fresh-baked pies and medals for marksmanship, good fellowship, and public service.
Where were my notes from that outrageous interview? Did they still exist? I file notebooks by date, but over the years they had multiplied like kittens, far too many for my desk drawer.
So, I had packed away the oldest. I remembered marking my name and DO NOT THROW AWAY on the cardboard boxes and storing them atop a row of newsroom filing cabinets.
I scanned the vast, nearly empty newsroom. That row of filing cabinets had vanished, probably when the newsroom was remodeled two years ago. Sleek, more modern cabinets were posted like sentinels outside the editors’ glass-enclosed offices. They were locked and bore signs warning that nothing was to be stored on top of them.
I checked the wire room and the hallways all the way to photo, then walked back to the library, known as the morgue in the good old days when reporting was more fun.
Onnie, always an early riser, was busy at her desk, marking with red grease pencil the stories in the morning paper that would be entered into the computer database.
She greeted me cheerfully. Tall and angular, she was an abused wife and mother, bruised in both body and spirit, when we first met. She’d been skinny as a rail, all sharp elbows and cheekbones, her collarbones like birds’ wings. I aided and abetted her escape. We packed her meager possessions in a U-Haul trailer attached to the back of my T-Bird to make her getaway before her violent husband and his brothers were released from jail.
Now pert and clear-eyed, she has added some weight and makeup. Her hair is still in cornrows, her dark skin the color of burnt toast. She is good-natured, smart, and hard working, with high energy and an unwavering determination.
“You’re just being polite,” I said plaintively, when she asked how I was. “You don’t really want to know.”
“Of course I do.” She put down the pencil, her intelligent black eyes concerned as I plopped heavily into the chair beside her desk.
“I’m pregnant, unmarried, and broke. My mother is totally freaked out and has probably disowned me. My best friend has abandoned me. I’m about to become homeless. I can’t find my old notebooks. And, oh, yeah, my car is about to conk out,” I added, remembering the AAA driver’s admonition to charge the battery. “Otherwise, my life is just peachy.”
“Whatchu talking about?” She looked more puzzled than sympathetic. “I haven’t abandoned you.”
I had to smile. “I meant Lottie.”
“Right. You have so many friends. But you were my best friend when I needed it most, and I’ll never forget it. I wouldn’t have this job or my life without you. Now, I don’t know about all the trials and tribulations you mentioned, but I can help with a few right now. First, I know Lottie hasn’t abandoned you. You two are like sisters. She thinks the world of you. You have more friends in high places than you think, Britt. God loves you too. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Make that your mantra. Repeat it whenever you feel lost or scared. It works.
“Now, about those notebooks. Did they happen to be in cardboard boxes with your name on them?”
“Right!” A slim shaft of hope pierced my gloom.
“I saw them when they remodeled the newsroom. They asked if we wanted those ratty old filing cabinets. We took them and I brought the boxes along. They should be here somewhere.”
I followed as she trotted briskly into the bowels of the library, past shelves of books written by former News staffers, past rows of old high school yearbooks, reference material, and stacks of city directories.
“There they are!” I marveled. “That’s them, I think!”
I was right. We carried them out to the front.
“Now, where were we? What was next?” she said. “Your car?”
I elaborated.
She nodded. “If it has tires or testicles it will give you trouble. No problem. You work later than I do. When I get off I’ll drive your car to Sears for a slow charge. My Honda is out in the parking lot; I’ll leave you the keys so you can use it.”
“But how will you get home from Sears?”
“I won’t. I can do a little shopping, grab a bite to eat, and then bring your car here or back to your place if you’ve already gone home.”
“You’d do that for me, Onnie?”
“Sure. That shortens the list.”
“Sounds like a plan. But wait, what about Darryl? Who will pick him up from school?”
“It’s his night out. No problem.”
“His night out? For Pete’s sake, he’s seven years old.”
She laughed. “His night out with Kathy.”
“Kathy who?”
“Riley.”
I did a double take. “You don’t mean K. C. Riley, the Cold Case Squad lieutenant?”
She nodded. “He really looks forward to it. She’s been wonderful.”
“I didn’t know you even knew her,” I said, stunned.
They had met briefly at Kendall McDonald’s funeral, she said.
For a time McDonald had been seeing us both, me and Riley, his colleague and his childhood sweetheart. Like many cops, she didn’t like reporters. We had first clashed when she was a rape squad sergeant, long before we realized we were also personal adversaries.
She grieved his death too.
Sometime after the funeral, Onnie said she was surprised when K.C. contacted her, asking to see Darryl.
“That doesn’t sound like her,” I said, finding it difficult to mask my incredulity.
“We talked about it. She said that McDonald gave his life to save my son. That there had to be a reason,” Onnie said soberly, “and he would want her to watch out for Darryl.”
I blinked several times.
“She picks him up after school once a week. They play softball in the park, see a movie, or visit the police horses at the stable. They have dinner somewhere—sometimes she cooks at her place—and she brings him home around eight.”
I still stared at her skeptically.
“You know how he’s always loved to draw?”
I nodded. Darryl’s crayoned creations had
decorated my refrigerator since he was four.
“She takes him to an art class over at the Miami Children’s Museum every other Saturday. They’ve been to the Metro Zoo, the Seaquarium, the Indian village in the Everglades, even a couple of Marlins games. It’s a blessing for him, and it gives me a little break. She’s a godsend.”
It was a side of K. C. Riley I had never seen. I knew she was smart and professional, a fearless stand-up cop who backed her detectives. But she could be as tough as nails to deal with, nearly impossible to pry information from, and a real bitch—at least to me.
“Darryl misses you, Britt.”
“He sounds much too busy to remember who I am.” Did I sound sarcastic and peevish? I guess I did.
“Kathy’s a good woman, Britt. You’re not still jealous of her, are you?”
“How can you even suggest that? I have no reason to be jealous. He loved me. I got the guy.”
Actually, I realized later, nobody got the guy. And I would give anything to go back to that place in time to the rivalry, the green-eyed jealousy, the envy, and pain. I’d embrace it all in a heartbeat—pain is healthier than the numb emptiness of loss. At least you feel alive.
We carried the storage boxes out to the newsroom and exchanged car keys.
Ryan, at the desk behind me, was hard at work on a feature about the ever-growing abandoned litters, packs, and tangled herds of rusting shopping carts blighting Miami’s suburbs, endangering motorists, and costing us all. Shopping-cart theft had become an epidemic.
“Nice story this morning, Britt. Can I see more pictures of that honeymoon couple? She’s hot. Shame if they’re shark bait,” Ryan said. “Specially her. She looked so cute in those shorts. Same thing almost happened to me,” he told Onnie.
I rolled my eyes.
Ryan had been lost at sea when an assignment from Gretchen, the editor from hell, went awry. She decided that the News should set a reporter adrift for a first-person account of the Cuban rafter experience: what it’s like to face strong currents and fifteen-foot waves in shark-infested waters, while escaping Castro’s Cuba. She chose Ryan, a gentle, seasick-prone nonswimmer from Ohio for the job. He was to remain adrift for twenty-four hours but accidentally dropped his handheld radio overboard. Swept south, he was picked up by a Cuban fishing boat.
Since the authentic escape raft, borrowed from the Coast Guard, was built on Soviet inner tubes, his rescuers assumed he was fleeing the island. A Cuban patrol boat took him to Mariel. The military suspected he was a drug smuggler or a CIA agent. They set him free after questioning, but the tide kept sweeping him back toward Cuba, where he kept being rescued and returned to the same interrogators. Finally they put him on a plane to Mexico City. Since he had no ID or passport, authorities there were about to put him on a flight to Toronto when he managed to call the paper from the airport.
By then, the Coast Guard had abandoned the search and his obituary had been written.
“Anything can happen out there in the Triangle,” Ryan said, describing the ravenous sharks that had circled him. Their numbers multiply at each telling.
If Ryan could survive being lost at sea, so could the missing newlyweds, I thought, and checked the Coast Guard for word. No news. Sea and air search still under way. I reported in to Vanessa’s parents in Boston. They hadn’t heard anything either.
Coast Guard Lieutenant Skelly O’Rourke, the public information officer, invited Lottie and me for a ride along on one of the search-and-rescue flights. The offer was probably motivated by our help with the photos and the public interest generated by that morning’s story.
We skimmed in ever-widening circles aboard a Dolphin helicopter, scanning the turquoise sea and the dark blue Gulf Stream, the world’s mightiest river, that flows swiftly through it. Eyes straining, we squinted into blinding sunlight reflected off the water but saw no sign of the missing boaters.
Our veteran pilot pointed out Thunderbolt Cay, the secret sub base used by British and U.S. ships during World War II as they hunted the Nazi U-boats shooting at our ships in the dangerous deep water off Exuma. And Spanish Wells, where, he said, inbreeding among descendants of the Royalists has resulted in “a lot of creepy-looking people, albinos with pink eyes, on Iguana Cay.”
We arrived back in Miami with no news, good or bad. I called the Hansens, said the Coast Guard was doing all it could, then dug into my dusty storage boxes and eventually found the notebook I’d scribbled in during that hot, unpleasant day in Texas.
Like most reporters, I take notes in my own style of shorthand and abbreviations. Sometimes they are difficult to decipher immediately upon returning to the office from a crime scene; these were nine years old. And, never one to waste paper, I always use both sides of each page and the inside covers.
Lawyers and cops, often eager to seize reporters’ notes, don’t realize that unless their specialty is hieroglyphics, it won’t do them much good, at least not in my case.
I over-report. Always. Better too much detail than too little. One never knows how much space a story will be allotted. It depends on what sort of news day it is, how productive the staff, and the size of the news hole—the space left for actual stories after all that infernal advertising. The problem with over-reporting is you then face the dilemma of what to leave out. Favorite quotes, juicy tidbits, background, and color that you badgered your sources for—and worked your ass off to get—often don’t make it into the newspaper.
Everything a reporter knows is never published.
I squinted at my old notes, as baffled as a pet dog trying to read a newspaper. I had the right pages. The little skull-and-crossbones doodle in the margin was clear evidence that I’d been sitting next to Spencer York at the time I drew it.
That story had been yet another skirmish in my daily war with editors. I remembered urging them to leave in more details about York and his “rescue missions” in other states. But space was tight that day, and my editors weren’t especially interested in what he’d done outside our circulation area.
Something had to be cut, and that was it.
But as my notes confirmed, York had described snatching children in Arkansas, New Mexico, and Texas. The details came back to me as I read on. One case involved twin boys. He’d mentioned, without a trace of guilt, that their panicked mother had stumbled and fallen down her front stairs after glancing out a window in response to her children’s screams and seeing York, a twin tucked under each arm, running to his old pickup truck. What went through that woman’s mind before she discovered his explanatory note and her ex-husband’s custody papers taped to her mailbox?
I thought at the time that York was damn lucky no one had ever shot him. Then somebody did. What if the publicity he loved had attracted a well-heeled client? Perhaps he had done another snatch to pay the rent. Maybe it went bad. Or a prior victim may have seized the moment, when news coverage made York a visible target. People from his past were all possible suspects.
The Custody Crusader had worked out of a post office box and operated on a shoestring. Where were the storage boxes with his notebooks and records?
I snatched up my phone on the first ring. Andy, the police desk rookie, sounded breathless. He had picked up snatches of Coast Guard radio transmissions. A survivor of the Calypso Dancer had been rescued and was being airlifted to a Miami hospital. Good news at last.
“Only one?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
“That’s what I heard, Britt. It sounds like they’re calling off the search.”
“Is the survivor a man or a woman?” I held my breath.
“Don’t know. I’ll keep listening. They haven’t put out anything official yet.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lieutenant Skelly O’Rourke is not the first man who lied to me and probably won’t be the last.
The Coast Guard public information officer had sworn he’d page me at the first hint of news about the Calypso Dancer. So much for promises.
He answered his phone. “Hey, Britt,
I was just about to call you.”
“Oh?”
“You bet. We found a survivor from the Calypso Dancer. He’s being airlifted to Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach.”
“He?”
“Sure thing. Marsh Holt, the missing bridegroom.”
I closed my eyes tight for a moment, thinking of the Hansens. “Any sign of her?”
“No.”
“You’re still searching, right?” I didn’t say I’d heard otherwise. Reminding law enforcement types that we monitor their radios encourages them to make it more difficult.
“The mission is no longer rescue but recovery,” he said. “And that may be impossible. It’s seven hundred fathoms deep out there.”
“But if he’s alive, she may be too,” I protested. “What if she’s still out there?”
“Unlikely, Britt. Between you and me? They talked to the husband. Poor guy. The vessel sank. She was belowdeck at the time. He saw it go down.”
“Oh, no.” He said he’d take care of her. Her father’s words rang in my ears. “What happened?”
“Sudden squall out of nowhere in the middle of the night.”
“But they had a radio. Why no distress call?”
“The boat took on water so rapidly he didn’t have a chance. You know how fast shit happens.”
“Has her family been notified?”
“The Commander plans to give them a call. The son-in-law wants to talk to them first. Then we’ll issue the press release.”
“How is he?”
“Suffering from sunburn, exposure, and dehydration. Emotional, as you can imagine. But considering he’s been adrift, clinging to a small life raft for three days, he’s in pretty good shape.”
“How’d he manage to find himself a life raft when he had no time to radio a distress call or rescue his wife?”
“That’s pretty cynical, Britt. You having a bad day? It’s one of those life rafts in a canister. When a vessel submerges it automatically detaches and inflates. They come equipped with a flashlight, laser, transistor radio, and night-vision goggles. Unfortunately, he lost the equipment in rough seas in the dark. Hell of a honeymoon.”
Love Kills Page 8