Shadows

by Edna Buchanan

  “I know. I said I would do what I could. And I did. As much as I’d like to, I can’t go put a gun to the guy’s head. I could lose my badge.”

  He turned his back on her, hating himself, and stepped into the bathroom. He peeled off his shirt, stared at himself in the mirror, then turned the hot water in the shower on full blast.

  He emerged from the steamy bathroom fifteen minutes later. The apartment was empty.

  “Fleur? Fleur!”

  She was gone. His gun wasn’t on the dresser. Neither were his car keys.

  He ran to the window. The driveway below was empty, his Mustang gone.

  The cab screeched to a stop in front of the apartment house on West Avenue. He tossed money at the driver and jumped out, praying he was in time. He saw his Mustang illegally parked at the curb.

  Nazario ran up the stairs. The door to Malek’s apartment stood ajar.

  He breathed a sigh of relief when he heard voices.

  “Are you crazy?” Malek was pleading. “Don’t do it!”

  Nazario pushed open the door. Malek cowered in a far corner, his face pale. Fleur stood in the center of the room, the gun in both hands. She was crying.

  “You son of a bitch! You thought you’d play that for my father?” Her voice sounded high-pitched and shrill. Her hands shook.

  Nazario winced. Her finger was on the trigger.

  “Fleur,” he said gently, trying not to startle her. “Fleur, it’s me, Pete. I’m sorry. Don’t do this.”

  “Thank God!” Malek reacted as though the cavalry had arrived. “You’re a cop! Stop her!”

  Fleur glanced over her shoulder at him for a moment, then quickly refocused on Malek.

  “I won’t let him do it, Pete,” she cried hysterically. “I’ll see him dead first!”

  “Good, the little prick deserves it,” Nazario said. He closed the door. “I don’t care if you shoot ’im.”

  Larry Malek wet his pants. “No, no,” he whined. “You’re a cop.”

  “Wait, just don’t pull the trigger yet, Fleur. Not yet.” Nazario pulled down a window shade. “You have my gun. Be careful. It has a hair trigger.”

  She wobbled on her high heels. Her hands shook more.

  “Listen to me for a minute, mi amor. You kill this piece of dirt with my on-duty weapon and my life turns to shit. Me vas a joder la vida. I lose my job, my certification, my pension. I thought we were friends. You can’t do that to me.

  “I’ll show you where to get another gun. I’ll give it to you myself.”

  “Take the tapes!” Malek pleaded. “Let’s forget the whole thing.”

  “Too late for that, pal. Didn’t I tell you you can only push people so far?”

  Fleur’s hair hung in her face. Her cheeks were wet, her knees shook.

  “I wanna shoot him, Pete. He’s so disgusting.”

  “You’re right, he deserves it.”

  “Please!” Malek cried.

  “Just give me enough time to get you another gun—I’ve got one down in the car.”

  “Take the tapes!” Malek howled. “I’m sorry!”

  “Where are they?” Nazario said.

  “One’s in the VCR. The other’s in the bedroom, in the briefcase.”

  “Where are the rest?”

  “That’s all there is. I swear.”

  Fleur’s outstretched arms wavered. Shoulders hunched, she closed one eye and trained the gun on his chest.

  “I swear. I swear. One more! Under the mattress. Take ’em all. Take ’em all. I don’t care. Just take ’em and go.”

  “Don’t squeeze that trigger yet, mi amor. Let me see if he’s telling the truth.”

  Nazario found the tapes. The one in the briefcase was inside a FedEx envelope addressed to Adair at a Rome hotel.

  “Don’t move,” he warned Malek. “She hasn’t slept. She’s strung out, wired. Don’t make her nervous. That gun has a hair trigger.”

  He ripped the pillows off the sofa and the bed, checked the kitchen cabinets and bedroom drawers, and tossed the rest of the apartment.

  “I think I’ve got them all,” he told Fleur.

  He stared at Malek. “You want to kill him now, mi amor?”

  Malek closed his eyes.

  “You sure you got ’em all, Pete?”

  “Yeah. You can always kill him later, with the other gun I’ll give you. It’s got no serial numbers on it.”

  “Promise?”

  “Sure. Let’s go now. The other weapon is a .45 caliber, so powerful that if you just hit him in the arm, the concussion will kill him. He’ll go into shock and you can watch him bleed to death.”

  “Okay.” She smiled at the thought, lowered the gun, and he gently took it from her hands.

  “Let’s go, mi amor.”

  She cocked her head at him for a moment, then took his arm, as though they were about to stroll into church.

  “You’re a lucky man,” Nazario said over his shoulder. “Don’t make her come back here. Because I won’t even try to stop her next time.”

  Nazario closed the door behind them.

  Holding hands, they ran down the stairs together.

  “You’re not really gonna give me another gun, are you?” she asked in the car.

  “No. I don’t want you to hurt anybody. That’s why I unloaded my gun on the way home, before I left it out on the dresser tonight.”

  “I knew that.” She snuggled up and rested her head on his shoulder.

  “You did not.”

  “Did too.”

  “How?” he demanded.

  “ ’Member the first time I picked it up and you snatched it away from me? It was heavier then, a lot heavier. Tonight it felt light. I knew there were no bullets.”

  “Damn! You know what it cost me to have that cab waiting?”

  “You sure we got all the tapes?”

  “I think so, mi amor.” He patted her knee.

  “Thanks, Pete,” she said, yawning. She was asleep by the time he pulled into the driveway at the Casa de Luna.

  CHAPTER 32

  “Plummer probably won’t talk to us again after today,” Riley said, “so this is our one shot at a confession. God knows we need one. We have no physical evidence. Come down as hard as you have to.”

  Energy burned at a high flame among members of the Cold Case Squad. R.J. Plummer’s fingerprints had been identified among others at the Wentworth murder scene but couldn’t be considered incriminating since he’d admitted being at the clinic prior to the crime.

  The meticulous killer had left no bloody shoe or hand prints—surprising, given the savagery and apparent spontaneity of the attack.

  “I wonder how hard they tried,” Riley said. “Given her relationship with certain police personnel, Wentworth’s case might have been destined for a back burner even before Pierce Nolan’s stole the spotlight and all the manpower.”

  “R.J.’s already sweating,” Burch said. “When I told him we were getting somewhere, I could almost hear the gears grinding in that obsessive mind of his.”

  At ten A.M. Burch began to watch the elevator door. The DNA sample shouldn’t take more than five minutes. At 10:45 Burch called the lab to question the delay.

  “Bad news,” he reported to Riley. “Plummer’s a no-show.”

  “Maybe he’s tied up on business,” she said.

  “Or lawyering up.”

  Burch checked the dealership.

  “The British broad said he didn’t show today and hasn’t called. Not like him, she said.”

  Ping went the elevator and all eyes turned to it as the door yawned open.

  “Hey!” Corso emerged. He huffed and puffed toward them. “What’s the name a your suspect again?”

  “Plummer, Ralph. R.J. Plummer. Due here an hour ago,” Burch said.

  “He ain’t coming,” Corso said. “Count on it.”

  “What you talking about?”

  “Just heard some patrol transmissions on my radio coming in. He’s involved in some
kind a hostage situation in the north end. As the taker, not the victim.”

  Burch’s phone was ringing, a North District patrol lieutenant on the line.

  “Guy shows up at a relative’s here ’bout an hour ago. Drags his ex-wife outta the house by her hair. Neighbors see him throw her into the trunk of his car and hear him threaten to kill her. Found your business card in the female victim’s purse, which was left behind. Thought I’d give you a call. I think the subject is a car dealer in the north end, Plummer.”

  “I know who he is,” Burch said. “Is she okay? Where are they?”

  “Anybody’s guess. He took off with her in a big Grand Marquis, black, with smoke-tinted windows, a landeau top, and fancy rims. We have the tag number.”

  “Listen to me,” Burch said urgently. “This is a hell of a lot more serious than you know. The man is extremely violent, a suspect in at least two homicides.”

  “We’ve got a county-wide BOLO out for him and the car. And somebody watching his house.”

  “We’ll be right out there. Son of a bitch!” Burch slammed down the phone. “How’d he know Lorraine talked to us?”

  The entire team, including Riley, went to the abduction scene.

  “Get this,” said the weathered patrol lieutenant at the house. “The victim, Lorraine Plummer, has been divorced from the subject for more than twenty-five years. Some guys never quit.”

  “Yeah. First love never dies, or some shit like that,” Burch said.

  “He bursts in this morning, marches up to her room, and drags her downstairs by ’er hair,” the patrol lieutenant told them. “She’s in her bathrobe, screaming all the way, right in front of the grandkids and her daughter, who doesn’t bother to call the police. Ain’t that something?

  “Hadn’t been for witnesses, it wouldn’t even have been reported. Two different neighbors heard screams, saw him throw ’er into the trunk, and dialed nine-one-one. No sign of ’em yet, even though the witnesses say he peeled outta here like a bat outta hell. You can see the rubber his tires burned on the road.

  “We’ve got people at his dealership and with their two grown sons, who say they haven’t heard from ’im.”

  Ralph Plummer’s daughter favored her father in more ways than one. Immaculately dressed in tailored linen, her eyes, like his, were dark brown and piercing. And only now, with several police cars, lights spinning, outside her well-manicured, upscale home, was she beginning to show signs of agitation, or was it annoyance?

  She checked her gold Cartier wristwatch. “It’s been an hour and thirty-seven minutes and I haven’t heard from my dad. I’ve called his house and his cell phone and he doesn’t answer.”

  She frowned at the small clusters of concerned neighbors watching solemnly from the safety of their own yards, tapped her well-shod foot three times, and would have wrinkled her Botoxed brow had that been possible.

  “I suppose all this will be my fault.” She sighed and pursed her lips.

  “Why do you say that?” Burch said.

  Her children stopped crying and lit up when they recognized Burch and Nazario, reminders of happier times just a day earlier.

  “Hi, Pete,” Courtney sang out, waving shyly to Nazario.

  The detectives exchanged stricken glances. “Little pitchers…” Burch said. “Crap!”

  “One of my children mentioned that Mother had spoken at length to two policemen yesterday. I called to tell my father last night.”

  She reacted defensively to their expressions. “Why shouldn’t my own father have a heads-up? Mother’s had him arrested in the past.”

  “For good reason, obviously,” Burch said. “Does he own a gun?”

  “Yes,” she said reluctantly. “His father was somewhat of a collector.”

  “Figures. His father ever own a shotgun?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Her stare frosty, she turned to go back into the house.

  “Wait a minute,” Burch said. “Where do you think he took her?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Does he have a weekend place, on the beach or in the Keys?”

  She shook her head, eyes beginning to show alarm. “He always goes to the same place in North Carolina on vacation.”

  The Highway Patrol and the airport were alerted, although, as Riley said, not much chance that even R.J. Plummer could succeed in forcing a screaming woman in a bathrobe through airport security. What she feared most was that Plummer might board an outbound jet alone, leaving Lorraine still missing or worse.

  “What did he say as he was taking her out of here?” Riley asked.

  The daughter shrugged off the question. “Just a lot of shouting and screaming.”

  “Think about it,” Burch warned her. “Think hard. Nobody’s gonna count out his strawberries for him every morning at the Graybar motel, which will be his permanent address if he hurts her.”

  She licked her lips. “Something about how dare she talk to the police about him after ruining his life. ‘I’ll show you what you made me do!’ The usual sort of thing, lots of cursing.”

  “What did she say?”

  She shrugged again. “Begged him to let her go. Pleaded with me and the children to call the police…to call you.” Her expression changed as though she suddenly realized the possible enormity of what she had not done, but she shed no tears, just rounded up her children and herded them inside.

  SWAT stood by, on alert, should they be needed.

  “The more time that passes, the worse it looks for her,” Riley told Burch. “Get recent photos of them both from the daughter and transmit them to cars in the field. He might have switched vehicles and/or plates already. The guy has access to an unlimited number of cars. Have Patrol stop every black Marquis that fits the description even if the plate number isn’t right.”

  “Where would he go?” Nazario agonized.

  “Wait a minute,” Burch said. “She told me yesterday that R.J. used to taunt her by driving her by the clinic after the doctor’s murder. That building is long gone; there’s a parking garage there now, but Pierce Nolan’s murder scene still exists.”

  “The Shadows,” Riley said.

  The yellow crime scene tape lay limp on the ground across the overgrown driveway.

  “We better check it out on foot,” Riley said. They donned their Kevlar vests, left the car, and with silent caution hiked up the driveway, the only sounds their own footsteps, the wind in the trees, and the raucous birds overhead.

  “Dead giveaways,” Stone whispered, scanning the sky as the feathered alarmists swooped and screamed.

  They paused at the driveway’s big curve. Burch left the drive, almost disappearing as he edged through the thick foliage. As he did so, through a sticky summer haze and the drone of insects, it flashed through his mind that long ago a killer may have taken the same stealthy steps along that path.

  Ahead, through dozens of shades of green leaves and vines, gleamed a shiny black Grand Marquis, its windows smoke-tinted, its trunk lid ajar.

  Listening intently, he sensed more than heard a woman’s sobs. Echoes from the past? A cry for help from the present? Sweat snaked down the small of his back as he stared at the house, dwarfed by the forces of nature overwhelming it, yet mute and defiant in its own historic presence.

  He slipped back to rejoin the others. “They’re here,” he whispered. “I think she’s alive.”

  Stone and Corso worked their way around to the back of the house, facing the water. The silver bay was still and mirrorlike, with a silky pink sheen across the horizon.

  As they watched, a sinuous water spout descended from a single thunderhead, twisting ominously as it raced across the bright water.

  Burch and Nazario stayed out front to cover the car and the front porch, radioed for backup, and prepared to wait.

  The birds had settled down, but a flock surged into the air as a woman’s hysterical high-pitched shriek came from inside the Shadows.

  “We can’t wait,” Riley said urgently. �
��He doesn’t know me. Let me try.”

  She took the stairs, light on her feet, angling her body away from the front door and windows. She stood to the right of the door and rapped sharply, her gun down at her side.

  “Mr. Plummer! R.J. Plummer! We need to talk to you. We need you to come to the door.”

  “Who’s out there?”

  “K. C. Riley, Miami Police Department.”

  She heard the woman squeal in protest, as though being dragged or pushed.

  “R.J.! Send Lorraine out, please. We want to make sure she’s all right. We’re concerned about your safety.”

  “No! Go away! Leave us alone!”

  “I can’t do that, R.J. Your daughter and your grandchildren are worried about you both. They need you to come out of there.”

  He muttered something she couldn’t hear.

  “R.J., I can’t hear you. Come to the door so we can talk.”

  “You come in, alone,” he demanded.

  “I can’t do that. We need you to come out, or close to the door so we can talk.”

  “Then it’s a Mexican standoff,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t. Because my squad is out here and we have patience. We like to settle these things before they become bigger than they need to be. But the SWAT team is on the way, and you know what that means, R.J. Tear gas, shock grenades, dogs, and snipers. They are not patient people. We can settle this now, just between us, before they show up. Let’s cheat them out of all their fun.”

  “No!” the woman screamed, and there were sounds of a scuffle.

  “Okay, R.J. I’m coming in there.”

  “No!” Burch shouted from behind her.

  But Riley pushed open the door and slipped inside.

  Nazario and Burch advanced behind her, moving up onto the porch, guns drawn.

  “Is she crazy?” Burch mouthed as they waited on opposite sides of the door.

  Riley scuttled to the right, crouched against the wall, her eyes adjusting to the shadows.

  Lorraine lay on the floor near the stairs, her blue bathrobe askew, one breast partially exposed. Her forehead was bleeding.

  “Look what she made me do,” R.J. Plummer said, exasperated. “It’s her fault.”